Cairo

ok so below is a photo of the pool from the hotel, this photo was taken from our balcony...

and here is one of Ewen's shirts after they came back from been washed, i suppose this is why they can justify charging so much for their laundry service! i think one load here cost more than every other load we've had done combined.

and here are two photos i took from our hotel, one before dinner and one after, from our table at dinner we could see one of the pyramids, it was surreal!

we went on a full day tour of Cairo our second day here, we got picked up at 9am and headed straight for the pyramids, after our guide gave us a run down of the history of the pyramids we went inside one of them, it was very narrow and the roof was very low, you had to walk doubled over, and the first part was steeply down hill and the second part steeply uphill. we actually saw one guy give up after the downhill bit when he realised he would have to go uphill, seemed a bit crazy seen as you had to pay extra to go in. it was interesting, but i expected more. the room you ended up in was basically just a large box... apparently there used to be carvings and paintings on the walls but the British stole those long ago, so we will get to see those when we go to the British museum.
After coming out of the pyramids we were given free time to take photos.

next up was a stop at the panoramic view over all of the pyramids, we had told our guide that we wanted to ride camels and she said this was the best and cheapest(ish) place to do it. we she helped us haggle for a good price and time and off we went on a 20 minute ride. our guide originally suggested a 40 minute ride but we opted for a short one, and I'm glad we did. while it was definitely an experience and it was fun it was also very uncomfortable and i felt sorry for the camels, mine seemed to have a piece of rope tied to one of its nostrils... poor little guy! and he looked about 1000 years old!





after this we went to a papryus workshop, which is where they make paper from papyrus plants (we were given a demonstration) it takes 10 days to make one piece!! then they paint the pieces of paper and you can buy the paintings. we ended up buying three... one large, one medium and one small painting.
next was a stop at a perfume factory, where they make perfumes purely by squeezing the petals of flowers, apparently no other ingredients are added. we ended up buying a gift pack of a few different types of perfumes, my favourite is one that smells like orange lollies!! at the moment though we're not too sure what to do because our hotel has just informed us you cannot send perfume in the post. we're going to look into this once we get to Turkey though, otherwise I'll have to carry a rather large box around in my backpack for the next 7 months which will be VERY annoying!
next we went to the Memphis museum, which is an open air museum where a lot of artifacts are on display. Ewen went to the toilet here and a woman standing out the front (doing nothing) asked him for money when he came out. people here are constantly trying to get money out of tourists. its much worse than Vietnam or Cambodia. We're pretty good at just saying no and walking away now though, we have mastered the art of been rude basically.


after this we went to Sukkura, where there were step pyramids and an embalming chamber. when me and Ewen tried to go in we were asked for our tickets by a guy, we showed him and he told us our tickets were fake. we explained our tour guide had got them for us and he demanded we take him to our guide, we did, although we were very confused. he got into a bit of a shouting match with our guide and driver and our guide ended up snatching back the tickets and telling us it was fine and to go in.
we explored this area fairly quickly because we wanted to find out what the hell had happened before. turned out the guy wanted more money and thought he would be be able to con it out of us or our tour guide. luckily our guide was very strong willed and wouldn't give in. basically it was just another scam, oh also, when we were walking into the embalming chamber a guy asked for our tickets again (a different guy this time) then started to give us a tour, we told him we didnt want a tour and he said something about it been locked then pulled keys from his pocket. we told him we had no money and he walked away. we still have no idea what he was trying to tell us he had keys to.. it was very strange!

last stop of the day was a carpet factory, which was interesting to learn how they make the rugs, although this particular factory used child labour and the rugs we liked were $4000 each!!! we declined buying souvenirs from here!!
we went to the Indian restaurant at our hotel for tea as apparently its the best in Cairo, it was delicious but Ewen got sick half way through our meal so we left early, the meal cost of the equivalent of four meals in Vietnam!!!
our last day in Cairo we slept in, i went for a swim and had a sunbake and then we watched movies in the afternoon. ewen was still sick so he stayed in bed recovering all day.

First taste of Cairo

Our plane arrived at 6am (we are now 7 hours behind you Aussie folk) and we zipped off to our hotel on the transfer organised through the hotel. i find it strange that we have stayed at $6 per night accommodation who offer free airport transfers however this $220 per night hotel makes you pay approx $50 for the transfer!! BIZARRE!
Luckily they let us check straight into our room which is on the 3rd floor and has a really nice view of the pool.
after a few hours of lazing about and using the internet (this isn't free either... $33 for 24 hours so we will only have internet access until tomorrow morning, can't afford it after that) and watching TV we went in search of food, after following some other people we ended up in a large room (or so we thought) that looked a bit too fancy for us in our shorts and t shirts (still the same ones from the previous morning when we left Siem Reap) but we were welcomed in and seated by a waiter. it was a breakfast buffet and had SIX tables filled with delicious hot and cold foods including several types of eggs, bacon, croissants, pancakes, french toast, pastries, fresh fruit, cereal, yoghurt, sausages, baked beans, etc etc. there was also a section of traditional Egyptian breakfasts. it was incredible and sooo delicious! we're not entirely sure if this was included in the price of the room or not, but ate two plates full just in case to get our moneys worth and this lasted us through until tea time. we spent the afternoon watching TV, talking to our families on skype, and swimming and reading by the pool. it was a lovely relaxing day. we're about to get ready to go and have some dinner at one of the many restaurants at our hotel.
tomorrow morning we are off on a tour of the pyramids!!!!
i'll let you know how that goes when we get to Istanbul on Friday

Bangkok airport

hey everyone, reporting from bangkok airport where we are spending 10 hours today/tonight. so far over 5 hours down so thats good! we have just deposited our unused coins in the computers as a test and turned out it gave usover 30mins of internet time so yay!im having to waste a lot of it trying to type on this keybard that appears to be made of old public pay phone keys. will write more frm cairo hopeully we will have wifi!!!

Siem Reap

Sorry about not updating for a while but I’ve been sick, and when not sightseeing I’ve been sleeping. Do you know where the worst place to be sick is? Siem Reap! When i know i may never come back so I’m trying to do everything I can while I’m here.
So on Thursday we got our plane from Ho Chi Minh to Siem Reap, the plane was only about a third full so we had a spare seat in our row which was nice. Ewen had only just picked up his book to read and already the pilot was telling everyone to prepare for landing, the flight was only about 45 minutes all up I think.
We got our visas no problem and luckily a driver from the hotel was there to pick us up… in a Tuk Tuk, which is a motorbike attached to a trailer with seats on it.
As soon as we checked into our hotel (about 1.30pm) and were shown our room I went to sleep for about 5 hours while Ewen went and had some lunch at the hotel restaurant and talked to some fellow travelers, one a man who has been staying here for 2 months so far!
Ewen woke me up at about 6.30 to have some dinner, we ate and then I pretty much went straight back to sleep.
In the morning we had booked a Tuk Tuk to take us to some temples at 8am so it was another early start. We could not believe how hot it was (I forgot to mention earlier, stepping off the plane onto the tarmac was like walking into a furnace, it is so much hotter here than in Vietnam) for only 8 in the morning! It was nice to be in the Tuk Tuk though and feel the breeze rush past us.
Ewen will probably give in depth accounts on all of the temples so I’ll leave that up to him, we spent 5 and a half hours seeing 5 different temples that first day of sightseeing and while they were all beautiful and incredible and unimaginable that they were all put their without the use of machinery I had had enough by 1.30pm when we got back to the hotel and after a quick lunch I went and had a nap still feeling pretty sick.





That night we got a Tuk Tuk into town to go to Pub Street which is the tourist area filled with restaurants and shops. We had a really nice dinner that we cooked ourselves at the table which was interesting! Then we went for a walk through the night market but I started to feel sick (I’m ruining Ewen’s holiday) so we came back to the hotel deciding we’d do a proper look through of the market the next night.
Today we got up at 4am!!!! that’s right, that is not a type! 4 in the morning!!! Our Tuk Tuk picked us up at 5am so we could see the sunrise over Angkor Wat, as we drove along in the dark we started to think maybe it’s a joke that people tell you to do this, maybe we would get there, the gates would be shut and guards would laugh and tell you to come back later but when we pulled up hundreds of people were already there including full tour groups on buses!
Crazy people!
But the sunrise was beautiful and after a while of fiddling with the settings on the camera we took some half decent photos. We stayed there for just over an hour then our Tuk Tuk took us to five more temples over the next 3 hours. We had had enough by then, 11 temples over 9 hours and 2 days was our limit so we got dropped off at the hotel and went back to bed. Poor Ewen is sick now too although he handles it a lot better than I do, he still managed to bound up the temple steps while I plodded along behind him.





It’s only 1pm here but feels like about 6pm I think it will be an early night for us tonight!

quick update

ewen is just checking us out of our saigon hotel so thought i'd quickly let you know we have changed our bangkok flight so we now spend an extra night in Siem Reap and only 10 hours at the Bangkok airport so crisis averted :-)
talk to you later from cambodia!!!

Mekong Delta & another lazy day in Saigon

I've gotten a tad behind, which Ewen is very happy about as he thinks its usually him that's behind. iv been sick the past two days so haven't been bothered to update this blog.
so far have tried Vietnamese panadol and Vietnamese paracetamol codeine with no success. hopefully i feel better tomorrow though because we are flying to Cambodia!!!!
so yesterday we went on a tour to the Mekong Delta, we had booked our tour through Viator as we got a gift voucher for Christmas, the website said it would have a maximum of 15 people on the tour which sounded great to us after 38 people on the Cu Chi Tunnels tour.
the bus was about 20 minutes late picking us up and we were starting to get worried they had forgotten us, luckily the woman at our hotel called the company for us and sorted everything out.
from the moment we met our tour guide he was infatuated with Ewen, he thought he looked exactly like Harry Potter and insisted on calling him Harry Potter all day and taking photos of them together to show his friends, who, apparently, would be very jealous!!
Here is Ewen posing with our tour guide, Ewen even used a chopstick as a make shift wand....
but I'm getting off track, so it turned out there was only four people on the tour including us. the other two were a south African couple who were traveling a little differently to us, staying in a 4 star hotel and they didn't seem to appreciate our tales of seeing dogs for sale at markets and eating crickets.... turns out they were vegetarians.
the drive down took about an hour and a half and i slept for most of it as I'd woken up feeling a bit sick.
our first stop was at a boat dock where we got on a boat (surprise surprise) that took us to a Coconut Candy Factory (if you could call it a factory... it didn't have any walls...)


Above is a photo of our boat and above that photo is a view of the Mekong taken from our boat

The other picture is the dock that we came in on to get to the coconut candy factory.
It was very interesting to learn about how the candy is made, pretty much all by hand, from impaling the coconuts on stakes to get them open, to scraping out the coconut flakes to boiling them, etc etc.
we were given some free samples and ended up buying two packets of the stuff.
The factory line of rolling out the candy, smashing it into pieces and individuall wrapping them in rice paper and then wrappers.
the factory also had an interesting display of souviners for sale, including these genuine crocodile skin shoes which i thought Dad would love but i'm a bit sceptical on whether or not I would get them back into Australia.
Next up was a ride on a trailer attached to a motorbike, during this ride we saw a rather large brown snake on the path, i was already worried but when the driver and tour guide looked worried i got even more worried! thankfully we drove for at least 10 more minutes so we put some distance between us and the snake. turns out that snakes here are pretty dam poisonous with some killing you within 20 minutes of been bitten, our tour guide told me that one particular breed of snake in Vietnam starts from 80kg only getting bigger and bigger!! he said that snake here is a bit of a delicacy so there are snake farms where they feed the snakes extra food to make them even bigger, he told us this was crazy and very dangerous!!!
we stopped off to try some fresh fruit; pineapple (so good!), mango and i think orange (but it tasted like grapefruit... kind of). after the fruit tasting our guide encouraged everyone to get into hammocks and have a nap, turned out he had been up late at the movies and was a bit tired, we spent about 30 minutes lying around which was nice and relaxing.

then it was back into the trailer to go to a restaurant for lunch

lunch was included in the price of the tour and included about 5 different courses! the first one was this fish which the waitress scraped meat off to make spring rolls for us which turned out to be really tasty, we also had prawns, chicken soup, fried spring rolls, and something that none of us could recognise, perhaps fried onions...

after lunch we got into a long narrow row boat for a leisurely float down a narrow part of the Mekong to get us back to our bigger boat.

on the boat ride back to the bus we had the opportunity to try some coconut juice straight from the coconut itself, only Ewen and the tour guide took up this offer but i had a taste of Ewen's and it wasn't bad, would have been much nicer it was cold though.


this is one of many floating houses we saw, some of them even have pet dogs living on them.
we got back to Saigon around 4pm and i went straight to sleep for 3 hours, poor Ewen was starving when i finally woke up so we went and had a quick tea then i went back to sleep.
today we haven't done much, went to a market this morning, then to the post office to mail home another package of souvenirs and unwanted things from our packs.
one thing i did see today was a shop that appeared to be the equivalent of Ann Gedy (the baby in the flowerpot woman) however over here you can get photos of your baby superimposed inside a melon.... sorry i didn't get a photo of this but i wish i did!!

Cau Dai Temple & Cu Chi Tunnels

We went on our first real tour today, 38 people on a bus heading for the Cau Dai Temple (which im sure Ewen will post a lot about, he was a tad more interested in this than i was) which is a temple where we got to watch a mass service, the religion is four combined; catholic, Buddhism, Taoism & Confucianism. they have four compulsory masses a day, one at midnight, 5am, 12pm, and 5pm. talk about your religion taking up your entire life! we saw at least one monk asleep against a wall, poor guy has no time to sleep in a proper bed in between all of those masses!
The temple was really nice though, very colourful
You had to take off your shoes and hats to go inside, apparently you're also supposed to dress modestly but i had shorts on (and some girls had TINY shorts on and singlets) but no one seemed to mind.
After the temple we drove a few more hours to the Cu Chi tunnels. we had the opportunity to climb into one of the original man holes (one not enlarged for fat American tourists)
we also saw some of the different booby traps the viet con constructed to catch or harm the american soldiers, some of them were pretty dam brutal!

we also had the opportunity to fire a gun, Ewen jumped at the chance but i was happy to skip this one, it was loud enough sitting around for the corner from where they were doing it let alone actually firing one! plus you know, its against my Pieta Religion :-)
once Ewen had finished shoopting we got a bit distracted buying cans of drink and talking to another girl from the tour and ended up a bit behind everyone else, when we caught up they were just finishing trying some shots, we're not sure what they were, but it involved snakes and alcohol. it was the most disgusting thing i have ever tasted! thank god i had the 7up for a chaser!
the best part of the tour was climbing through the tunnels, it was a stretch of 100m and you had four opportunities to get out; 20m, 40m, 60m or the full 100m stretch. me and ewen had three people in front of us managed to do the full 100m but surprisingly not too many other people managed it, it wasn't as bad as i thought it would be, although it was VERY hot as you can see form how sweaty i am! at some points it was high enough that i could walk just bent over, but sometimes you did have to crawl on hands and knees.






we arrived back in Saigon around 6.30pm very hot, sweaty and tired. we had a quick dinner of pizza before coming back to the hotel to shower. luckily we have finally got our laundry back from the hotel as we were both basically out of clean clothes! Tomorrow we are off on our tour of the Mekong Delta then its just one more day in Saigon before we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia

Laszy day in Saigon

hey there
so i really only wrote about my haircut yesterday, we did do a little bit more than that (but not much)
we slept in and then went and had an early lunch, after this i wanted to go to a market i'd heard good things about, we walked for a while and ended up at a market that was pretty small, turned out i was looking at the wrong map and we had walked in the complete oppostie direction that we needed to (not sure why ewen leaves me in charge of the map reading) so eventually we made it to he market, sweat pouring off us. the market was really good but we over spent
6 tshirts
2 sets of bamboo bowls
one set of fairy light lanterns
one head band
one bag
doesnt sound like too much i suppose, but its probbaly the most souviners we've brought for the whole trip!
we thought we may as well do it now why we can still afford to shop :-) once we hit europe it will be window shopping all the way, how depressing!
so after some shopping i went to he hairdressers then we went for a look through some of the town and then had tea, that was our day!
here is just some of the phone/power lines around the centre of town.one of many hawkers, we stopped at this cafe to have a drink and ended up with THREE hawkers around us (one selling books, one selling sunglasses and one selling wallets) i caved and ended up buying two books, they are photo copied ones and the covers are printed on photo paper so they are kind of sticky, its a bit weird!!!



me and ewen having after an after dinner drink at a bar around the corner from our hotel