Michelle and Brent

Friday April 25, 2008 noonish

Hello again!
We are now in Byron Bay, Australia. It is up near the border of New South Whales and Queensland, on the east coast. It is a small town based around the beaches, and the tourism that they bring in. Very nice here, but very busy as today is a public holiday, ANZAC day (their version of remembrance day). We managed to find a nice backpacker hostel that could accomadate us for 4 nights, as most were full due to the long weekend. We are about a 2 minute walk to the beach which is excellent!
We arrived here yesterday afternoon after 3 days in Surfers Paradise (town name, but also the truth). This place was awesome, the beaches were spectacular, and the waves were amazing. I took a beginners surfing lesson, which was 2 hours, and I must say that I was at the top of the class...I showed those 10-12 olds how its done!
The beach was miles long, as the whole way along the coast it is covered with hotels, and not just motels and small hotels, but huge skyscraping hotels! The streets were packed with people, shops, bright lights, attractions like haunted houses and bungy swings. It sort of reminds me of Niagara Falls in the summer, but with a beach. We really enjoyed it there, but decided to check out this beach town a little further south as well.
The water is quite refreshing at both beaches, and the sun has been shining pretty much the entire time, which is a nice change from the days of rain in Sydney.

Now that we have reached the small town Byron Bay, with no skyscrapers, and a much more relaxing, young person vibe (Surfers Paradise was mostly vacationing families), we have decided to spend our last few days of our vacation here. We fly back to Sydney on tueday morning, bright and early at 6am. From there we will head even further south to my friend Grant's place in Wollongong where he is at teachers college. After spending tuesday night there, we will take a train back to Sydney (only one hour, suburban train) on wednesday to spend our last night at my cousin's place again before embarking on our 2 day flying adventure back around the world to canada.

We will definately blog one more time before arriving home, but this is fair warning to everyone to get ready for our return!

In the meantime, we will enjoy the sun and the surf for a few more days, and we are looking forward to the comfort of our own beds in one weeks time.

Brent

April 10, 2008 7:30 pm

"Cheers Mates"
As all the New Zealanders and Australians say around here.

We are now on our Contiki tour. After Wellington we caught the ferry to Picton in the south island. The ferry took about 3 hours, with some of the most spectacular views. We then hopped on a bus into Christchurch that afternoon. Our tour started the following day in Christchurch.

So far so good! We had a lot of time on the bus on our first 2 days of the tour, but saw some wonderful things, made it to the west coast and everyone on the tour is pretty cool!

Yesterday we hiked up a glacier and out onto the top of it which was amazing. A good climb and freezing for the hour we were out on it. The coolest part is that the glacier is beside a rain forest and has no snow on it, just ice.

Today we are in Queenstown. Arrived last night and went up the mountain side gondala for a delicious buffet dinner. Today we wondered around the town and did some shopping. I went on a Canyon Swing, which is essentially a bungy jump, in a canyon, which you swing out over. Crazy scary! and I cried, but fun as well. Although I dont think I will be doing anything like that again. I dont even like rollercoasters that much. Also on a side note, it was a thousand times scarier than sky diving cause you had to jump yourself.

Tomorrow we have a full day hike on the Routeburn trail. Brent goes for his bungy jump the next day of the first bungy jump bridge ever done by A.J.Hackett.

Thats all for now. We are both doing well and looking foward to the Ice Bar we will be going to tonight.
BYE!!
Michelle

Wednesday March 26, 2008 - 3:45pm

Today is the day we leave India.

We have spent the past few days seeing all that Mumbai has to offer, and actually enjoying it quite a bit more than other places. Michelle has been able to dress more relaxed, as there are plenty of tourists around to distract from us. We have done plenty of shopping, and in turn had to mail home another package!

We took a "sightseeing" tour the other day with a taxi driver, something that has been offered to us a thousand times over in every city, but one that we had yet to do. So we decided to try it. It was a 4 hour journey that was actually not all that exciting. We thought we would get to see everything, we thought we would have too much time, then we thought we would run out of time...amazing how things can change in such a large and busy city. We got to see a mosque that is in the ocean, connected by a causeway that is covered at high tide, creating an island, which was cool. We saw a few other temples and large gothic-style buildings. We saw the "hanging gardens" on the highest point of Mumbai which overlooked filthy Chowpatty Beach area. Then we saw the Tower of Silence, which is not so much a tower as a building in which the Parsi people (very small minority group) hang the dead to be picked clean by vultures. They believe that both fire and earth are sacred, and therefore do not bury or incinerate dead bodies. Lastly on this tour we went to the cricket stadium, but much like the rest of the sights, we could not go in as access is restricted. All in all it was ok, however we both had higher expectations.

Yesterday we went to see one final site that we did not get to on our tour. This was the Victoria Terminus, the main train station for this bulging at the seams city. It is said that 2.5 million people pass through its gates each day. The building itself was very impressive, old gothic style again and massive! We walked around inside and outside, then started to head back to our end of the peninsula. On the way we found a movie theatre and decided to see "The Bucket List" with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Surprisingly funny. Along our walk home after the flick, we passed the University of Mumbai and a large greenspace with some pick-up cricket and soccer games being played.

This morning, after checking out of our hotel, we wandered down to a closer movie theatre and watched "Juno", which we had seen earlier this year back home, but enjoyed it enough to see again. After that, we ate some lunch at....wait for it...McDonalds! Can you believe it? I am even a little shocked at the two of us, as we usually stay far away from it at home. However we decided to try it because there is no beef on the menu at all. It is completely different. There are more vegetarian options than meat options, and some crazy things you would never expect, nor can I really describe, such as Paneer Tikka Wrap, Shahi Paneer wrap, and McAloo Tikki Burger. We had a Mcveggie burger, a McAloo Tikki Burger, and a sort of Pizza pocket type thing called a McVeg Pizza Puff. All vegetarian for us, but not too shabby. Instead of the famous BIG MAC, they have the Chicken Maharaja Mac, which I found quite amusing.

So now we have the rest of the day to kill, as we fly out at 11:55pm. We will head to the airport leaving around 8, as it could take up to 2 hours to get there, even though it is only 30km or so. We have some plans to hang out in a Barista again, very much like a starbucks.

We stop off in Kuala Lampur en route to Auckland for 13 hours tomorrow during the day, so hopefully we can leave the airport and wander the city a bit.

The next post we do will most likely be from New Zealand, where we will be staying the first couple nights with Michelle's friend Rachel.

Namaste, and goodbye India!

Brent

Saturday March 22, 3:30pm
Happy Holi! Today is the Indian festival of colours. Basically people paint themselves in colours and drink lots of beer and bhang lassies (marijuana drinks) and run around the streets.

So we made it to Mumbai yesterday afternoon. Where have we been since the last post you ask well no where really. In fact we were unable to move from Udaipur where we blogged once and added pics till yesterday. Why havnt we been more adventurous you ask, well... I was sick. And I mean down and out. There was absolutly no moving and no eating for me for a good 3 days. It happened one afternoon and it was probably worse than anything you could imagin. Really. I shocked Brent, although he was a wonderful companion and nursed me back to life. The hotel was a less than desirable place to be when I was sick and i wished very much to be at home in my bed, and my bathroom.

But that is all in the past now and we are moving foward. We took the train from Udaipur to Mumbai, 18 hours overnight and arrived about 3 o'clock the next afternoon. Our arrival was pretty smooth considering we had just entered a city of 16 million. We got into a cab that only tried to charge us 3 times the actual fair, and was a real creeper. But with Brent being a fierce haggler, we were able to only pay twice the actual price. Our hotel is pretty good and comes with breakfast delivered to our room in the morning although the room itself is quite small, the bathroom is clean and a billion times better than the last place where all the terribleness of being sick occured.
We are both in good spirits now that we are away from Udaipur. I believe that our hotel was making us both sick, at least the food there was.

We are staying in the area of Colaba in south Mumbai, about a 4 minute walk from the gates of India, and the port and harbour. We walked down there today which was quite nice. The area itself is wonderful, and less dirty than all the other places we've been so far, even in this, Forbes rated, the dirtiest city in India, 7th dirtiest in the world. Our street is quiet, with lots of big houses and trees. An old part of town.
We intend to do some sight seeing around the city a little in the next few days, get a few gifts for people, and relax till our flight on Wed.

Hope all is well at home and that winter will finally let up some day soon.

On a personal note, Brent and I have each gotten an acceptance to Graduate programs for the fall. We will have to see if many more roll in.

Bye from Mumbai.
Michelle

Sunday, March 16, 2008 - 4:30pm

We left you last in Pushkar, with Michelle feeling very uncomfortable most of the time, and newly covering her entire body when going outside of our hotel rooms. Well this hasn't changed, as she is still covered all the time, but it does seem to be working as the stares we get are less intrusive, and not quite as common (although still there).
Pushkar was an excellent time! Lots of travellers and tourists and tonnes of cool shops lining the streets around the small man-made lake. The day after the last post, we did some fun and interesting things. Firstly, we found a place for Michelle to get some henna work done on her hands (part of the morphing into an Indian woman technique). This was essentially a barber shop sign we found, and one of the men there brought us to his house where his wife (16-18 year old, 95 pound thing with a dilpoma in henna) would spend the next hour or so making Michelles hands very pretty. I also got a little bit done, but just a flower (lotus) on my tricep to see what it would be like to have a real tattoo there (by the way it looks awesome). After that, we had some lunch and signed up for an evening camel trek! This was great fun, but a little painful. It started at 4:30 and went until about 7:30, with a small break after an hour (much needed) and another small break to watch the sun set, which was quite lovely as it was desert area surrounded by mountains. Camels are more fun and feel much safer than elephants, but neither are really as good as one would hope. My butt is still sore, and so is Michelle's back (different areas are sore due to the protective sitting techniques we employed to save ourselves from more pain, specifically for me...if you catch my drift).
The next day we shopped a little bit in the morning and headed to a nice little hotel called the Lotus 'B' House where we had arranged to have cooking lessons with the man that ran the place, Kamal. He was excellent and taught us everything we wanted to learn. We got to try basically everything on the menu and learned how to make it, which is excellent, and definately a skill we both wanted to acquire. The best part was that he was teaching cooking by donation only, unlike one of the other places we had gone to which was 400 rupees ($10) each.
The next day we decided to depart Pushkar by means of bus. We had to take a city bus to nearby Ajmer, then a tuk-tuk (taxi) to a travel agent (that we had set up in Pushkar), then another tuk-tuk to the departure point. It was a little stressful, but we managed. We had reserved a "sleeper" seat on this bus which is the first of such designations on our trip. It was a small double bed enclosed by walls and sliding doors perched above the normal coach bus seats below. Very comfortable for a long bus journey. We arrived last night here in Udaipur (apparently one of the most romantice cities in India) around 8:30 pm. We found a hotel overlooking the lake and lake Palaces (yes thats right, island palaces on the lake, this is where James Bond's "Octopussy" was filmed). This morning, after a well deserved sleep-in, we wandered around and eventually made our way to the city palace, where we splurged for a guided tour. It was very informative and fun. We will spend a few more days here before heading either to Goa (via aiplane if we can find a cheap enough flight), or somewhere else via train/bus (if we can't find a cheap flight.), destination undecided.
Tonight we have plans to watch Octopussy, as every hotel shows it every night at 7. Other than that we will continue to relax as much as possible, gearing up for the finale of India in bustling, chaotic, crazy Bombay (mumbai) in about a week.

Over all, the first 10 days of this trip have had their ups and downs, but it is getting easier, and we are enjoying ourselves, even though we get overwhelmed at times.

Bye for now,

Brent