I just realised that two years ago today Justine and I began our first overseas holiday. While on holiday, I made sure to document our travels both with the camera and with the pen. If you didn’t read along the first time round, or you’d like the be an armchair tourist, go ahead and have a look!

It doesn’t feel like it’s been 20% of a decade since we were there, but it has. I have a lot of fond memories of this trip (as I’m sure most readers can attest to) so I’m going to enjoy reliving it through these posts.

Read from the beginning or catch up to when we first landed in London.

For the third year in a row, we are both incredibly fortunate and lucky enough to be able to again travel to an overseas destination. This will bring our total time overseas to thirteen weeks in three years (2007-2009), or just over 8.3% of that time — it’s gone down from 9.6% in 2007-2008 and 13.4% in 2007.

This year, after to-ing and fro-ing between South America, Africa, Turkey, Hungary and a few other places, we finally agreed on visiting the USA. At first it certainly doesn’t seem as exotic a locale as any of the earlier suggestions — and, I suppose, it’s not really — but with fantastic destinations like New York (somewhere I have wanted to visit for longer than any of the places we’ve actually visited thus far), San Francisco and the visit-at-least-once-in-a-lifetime Las Vegas on our list we have a great few weeks ahead of us. It’s still over a month away but, as usual, we’ve been reading and scouring and planning for ages already.

Something I’m doing this time around is plotting the location of all of the activities, sights and other places we want to see using Google Maps. I’ve not done much of it yet but I’m hoping it will allow us to make better use of our time away by allowing us to see all of the things we want to see in a specific location rather than circling around aimlessly and revisiting locations when we don’t need to. Having lists of what we want to do has, in the past, made it possible to see a lot and not forget those things we might otherwise overlook while in a new and interesting place.

The trouble with such lists, though, is that it can prevent the thrill of discovering or doing something unexpectedly and that will definitely be a bit of a tightrope walk. However, we’ve done it pretty well in the past — usually we check off all of the things quickly and efficiently and then spend time aimlessly wandering. A combination I’ve enjoyed: how else do you end up at a fish massage joint?

We’ve also planned a few firsts into our trip. Neither of us have ever flown in a helicopter, and what better way to experience your first flight than flying over the Las Vegas strip, seeing the massive Hoover Dam and then landing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

Our previous technology setup of digital SLR, point-and-shoot cameras, along with a large portable hard disk (unfortunately, the card reader/hard disk packed it in last year) and — last time at least — a netbook has worked well and I don’t see much reason to change that.

However, if all goes well, I am hoping to take an iPhone or Android-based phone (the decision of which is beginning to loom heavily) along with the purchase of a US prepaid SIM allowing inexpensive data usage. Using a smartphone will allow for location-based activities such as finding public toilets (a must!), and other places such as nearby places to eat. And when you can use something as cool as Wikitude, why not use that too?

We fly out on September 4th, a date rapidly and ever-faster accelerating towards right now.

In just a few days we will be heading overseas on another adventure. This time, it’s to Asia. Unlike our last holiday, all the travel and accommodation plans are locked in as we’re going for half the time. Part of the fun on our last trip was being able to shift our plans (which we did a number of times, leaving places early and changing destinations entirely) but there’s not really enough time to do so on this trip.

Also, we’ll be taking Justine’s tiny laptop which means that if our hotel has in-room Internet access (and is free or cheap) we can talk to you via IM or Skype. It also means we can download our GPS Data and photos along the way which I think will be a great help. The small unit I have is still coming along to store the photos, but having the laptop means we’ll have more opportunities for uploading unprocessed photos to Flickr or blog more.

I have plotted our rough locations onto the map below to help with visualising where we’ll be heading. Our journey will include:

• November 1st - 4th: Siem Reap (including Angkor Wat)
• November 4th - 10th: Hanoi (including Ha Long Bay and Mai Chau)
• November 10th - 14th: Beijing
• November 15th - 16th: Xi’an
• November 17th - 22nd: Hong Kong

Trying to decide what I am most excited to see is–once again–incredibly difficult. I think the highlights are going to be the “big ticket” items that everyone’s heard of: Angkor Wat, the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, Ha Long Bay, the Forbidden City. But the visits to Mai Chau, the night markets in Siem Reap and Beijing and Hong Kong’s neon overkill are equally appealing.

The thing I am least looking forward to is the dramatic change in weather: Cambodia and Vietnam are always quite hot and China at this time of year will be cold. So, we’ve had to pack a bit more than I would like. We also have a large number of flights which means a lot of airports and a lot of waiting. Not my cup of tea but without that pain there will be no gain.

Somewhere between Mount Gambier and Tantanoola, South Australia.

Early into our Adelaide road trip, I told Justine I wanted to stop roadside and get a photo of a rusty old windmill. Why, I wasn’t sure, but I set myself the task of shooting it nonetheless.

It took until the third day to get one with the right conditions of us driving, a windmill being present and the sunlight casting itself attractively over the scene.

I think this shot also fits well with the feel of our current story, which is another reason I chose to post it now.

For Justine’s birthday, we rented a small self-contained villa a few kilometres outside of Hepburn Springs. Even though her birthday had been a few weeks earlier, this was the first weekend since then we’d been able to get away.

Getting there was easy, even without a GPS (is it like we’re in the dark ages?) though we did drive past the driveway to the property as it was hard to spot. A quick U turn and we were sorted. After quickly investigating the place — quite nice; a canopy bed, spa bath, sauna, large shower and small kitchen — we headed back through Hepburn Springs and into Daylesford to buy some dinner to prepare later and returned.

The view from our villa was — for over 270 degrees — totally unspoiled with nothing in front of us but bushland. To the right was another villa but since it was difficult to see, it wasn’t a big deal.

After a great night of relaxing and burning myself trying to cook marshmallows in the open fire with a small pair of tongs, we headed out and about. We first checked out a big antique/collectibles place which had a lot of stuff but nothing which really took our fancy. We then made our way to visit a honey stall (where an asian couple were buying over $350 worth of honey!) and to a chocolate “mill” where Justine had a wonderful time ogling the chocolates.

We headed further into Castlemaine which was a ghost town compared to Daylesford, so turned immediately around and headed back. We stopped in at a second-hand bookstore which had so many books it was hard to know where to start. After a bit of looking Justine bought a couple of books she enjoyed as a kid and I bought first editions of “The Amtrak Wars” (paperback, from the 80s) and “A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur” (hardback, from 1935). Neither are in great condition or worth much, but it’s nice to have them anyway.

Dinner consisted of a wood-fired Calabrese pizza (me) and Spaghetti Puttanesca (Justine) and wasn’t too bad. We then retreated to the villa where I gave the sauna a whirl; we chucked a few potatoes wrapped in foil into the fire. And promptly forgot about them… until one exploded.

Next morning we checked out the local Daylesford market; not much worth checking but we did find a print of San Parco place in Venice, which the stallholder was selling for only five dollars. The frame is a little dirty but the picture itself is in good condition. We are interested in reframing it anyway, but the frame is probably worth more than the canvas print.

Justine wanted to take the steam train from Daylesford to Maldon but as we arrived at the station realised we had the information wrong — there’s one from Daylesford to somewhere, and Castlemaine to Maldon. Instead, we drove directly to Maldon where a food and wine festival was running for the day. I had a nice yabby bisque and Justine a vegetable pie — which was vegetables and pastry, nothing else — as well as buying some harissa paste which I’ve been wanting to try for a while.

Tired, we headed home and arrived at a reasonable hour before retiring for the night.

Taken at around 12am (Bangkok time) while waiting for our plane’s departure lounge to open.

Day Nine
Amsterdam
16 August 2007 22:39

Today was a lazy day. After more than a week of walking until we almost collapsed we needed some time off.

We ended up watching TV (most of which was in Dutch) until around 10:30am and headed out around 11:00am. An episode of Spongebob was quite funny in Dutch.

After, we strolled out to the Van Gogh Museum where we waited in yet another line for ~25 minutes before entering. I’m not a fan of Van Gogh’s style and don’t consider him to have been a particularly good painter and the museum didn’t change that. Justine did enjoy the museum though.

Walking back in the direction of our hotel, we grabbed some food from a local supermarket and decided to return to our hotel.

Some TV was in English so we flicked channels a little while, while eating our sandwiches.

Around 10:00pm (nothing opens hereuntil 11:00am or 12:00pm and is open late) we headed out and grabbed some fritjes (French fries) and fritssaus (fry sauce), which is a creamy mayonnaise-style sauce that is widely eaten here. A stir-fry place was next door so we grabbed some rice and shared both.

We needed a “day off” (strange we needed a holiday from our holiday) and both feel a lot better for it.

Tomorrow evening we leave for Munich on an overnight train which will be interesting, I’m sure.