A Weekend in the Centre

The third stop of our journey around Oz was a far bigger jump than the previous, so there was no time to waste. We barely had time to squeeze in a swim in our magnificent hotel pool at the Sheraton Port Douglas, or to have a peek at beautiful Four Mile Beach (my former commute to work), before it was time to pack up and head to the centre of Australia.

We were happy to learn on 26 November that Qantas had NOT yet gone on strike again! We were a little wary of flying with them, as we were making the flights bookings just as the strikes were happening just a few months back. This time when we landed, our runway was surrounded by red dirt and scrub, and we disembarked making jokes about being celebrities or presidents and the like (there's something about descending a stairway onto tarmac that feels so old-fashioned and glamorous!). It was hotter than ever and not a chance of rain in the vivid blue sky.

We checked into our hotel, and headed off to The Rock, loading up on water and hoping to catch the cooler time of the day in the late afternoon (actually, I kind of forgot at Uluru, it's ALWAYS oven-roasting hot). We checked out the very excellent park cultural centre and managed to brave one or two short walks, dodging tour groups and flies along the way. We caught a pretty fantastic sunset over the big rock-- probably what most people expect when visiting Uluru, but having experienced torrential rain on my first sunset viewing a few years back, I was very happy!

The next day was a real test of our stamina as we watched the themometer in the car climb to 34 degrees, then 36, then finally 40! We wanted to see as much of Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) as possible, but every time we got out of the car again for another walk to a cave or a trail seemed harder in the blazing heat. I feel like we did see a good chunk of the national park -- caught a great sunset, checked out cave paintings and water holes, and even saw a few lizards just before they dashed back into the scrub. The desert was actually very green when we were there, and there were wildflowers everywhere -- not what my parents pictured at all. The scenery and the colours of the landscape were incredible and it was yet another place that I was thrilled to revisit -- with a much better camera this time -- and seeing Uluru from the plane this time was quite the sight!  Finally, we felt like we'd seen (and sweated) enough and took a break at the hotel pool at Sails in the Desert, which to our surprise was ICE COLD. The desert really is a strange place....

*In case you're wondering, this is not the hotel pool.

Spending Like Millionaires.... of Dong

We've just woken up to our second morning in Vietnam a little fuzzy-- maybe from the 4 hour time difference from Melbourne, maybe from the million or so dong we spent on a big day of eating and drinking. EEK! OK, so a million dong (that's the Vietnamese currency) works out to be about $90AUD, and less than that in Canadian, but we've now learned it's still definitely possible to spend lots of money, even in a place with prices as cheap as Vietnam. So today we'll live frugally! Except for our "extravagant" hotel room, that is-- with TV, free internet, A/c, balcony, ornate sculptured ceilings, private bathroom, fridge, and enough room to fit two dressers and a desk-- for $15 USD. Sweet!

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at about 8pm on Feb 20, and were immediately awestruck by all of the people and the lights-- the neon light signs were visible even from the plane! After spending so much time in the vast empty parts of Oz, riding streets alongside hundreds of buzzing motorbikes was a trip! We checked into out guesthouse and hit the town with our friend Warren, who is teaching English here (Adrian used to work with him at ANZ bank). Good times on the tourist strip-- eating great noodles from a street vendor on child-size tables and plastic stools!-- for less than a $1 USD pp., drinking Tiger beers for next to nothing too, and people-watching... welcome to Asia! Warren's been enjoying the HCMC life for about 8 months now, and isn't at all ready to say goodbye to the city-- something we're starting to understand as we get into its energy, which is sort of laid-back but a little nuts at the same time. Got scared half to death by a giant rat scurrying through our laneway on the way back to our hotel (seriously bigger than the stray kittens hanging out on the street) and we were thankful to be staying on the 4th storey of our building.

Yesterday we woke up with that "Oh my god, where are we?" feeling that happens on the first morning of any trip and ventured out in the humid sunshine (29 degrees). I grabbed a Western breakfast and Adrian went straight for the pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) and we took a walking tour of part of the city, marvelling at the scenery and practicing our street-crossings. First lesson: There are crosswalks painted on the roads, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference where you cross. Lesson 2: Find a tiny gap in the constant barrage of cars, buses, and motorbikes, and start walking across very slowly... something that goes against all instinct when a speeding bike's coming at you, but if they'll steer around you with ease if they can tell where you're heading and how fast. Cars are another story-- GET OUT OF THE WAY! is about the best advice to follow.

We wandered through some street markets (vendors very grabby in parts) and managed to find the necessities-- a SIM card for our phone ($6 AUD!), a plug converter, and a bath pouffe-- which all took a bit of Charades and Pictionary, as we're finding Vietnamese is a very hard language to pick up quickly! But we've learned a few basics already and we're working on mastering the conversion math [11,000 Vietnamese dong equals $1 Aussie dollar; $1 USD equals 16,000 dong. We'd like to eliminate one currency, but our savings are in AUD and some of the prices here are in USD and some in VND.... and then there's all the bloody zeroes to deal with..... yarrrrrrrr!].

We met up with Warren in the late afternoon at Fanny, a great ice cream shop with delicious flavours and very artistic sundaes (I had a Canard, ice cream in a duck-shaped basket with wafer wings!) and the evening went on from there-- to gorgeously decorated, swanky coffee shops, a Pho restaurant, and a bar or two. But most memorable of the night was when I got entirely lost in the city on the back of a motorbike taxi-- it's scary enough being right in the thick of the traffic, but then my motorbike taxi driver lost Warren and Adrian, who were on Warren's bike and said "Follow us!" and zoomed off to disappear into the crowd. Everything looks mildly familiar in HCMC, but the street names are long and difficult to remember, and I have a terrible sense of direction without a map or the sun to guide me. So I spent about 45 minutes on the back of this old man's (who didn't speak a word of English) motorbike, reading street names aloud and hopelessly trying to communicate with him. Of course, Adrian had our phone, the hotel key, the backpack.... I was lucky we split up our money in the morning and had 500,000 dong in my pocket, as I'd left my wallet in the backpack on Adrian's back too! I also had our new phone number in my pocket but didn't know how to use a payphone, let alone speak the word "telephone" to the driver. Eventually he pulled over and had me speak with some other motorbike drivers, and I managed to write down our hotel's address, as I guess I'm hopeless at pronouncing it properly.... and then my driver couldn't find the street.... it went on and on.... finally in some miracle we came across it, and I had to run around trying to change this big VND bill to pay my 50,000 ($5) fare. Somehow Warren had a feeling to check our hotel, and I was just about to call the guys when he appeared on his bike to save me! We zoomed back to where he left Adrian, and who was Adrian hanging out with but the old motorbike taxi driver who didn't know his way around town! We decided to go to a bar close by, this time split up the mobile phones, and when Warren and I got to the bar, this time it was Adrian who had disappeared.... well, I guess we shouldn't have used that driver's services again, cuz he dropped Adrian right off at our hotel, despite the driver and Warren's agreements to meet on a certain street. At least Adrian's ride was a bit cheaper than mine.... needless to say a lot of beer was necessary after that.... and that's about all I can say about our second day in Vietnam!

PS. If you can figure out how to call/text Vietnam, we'll be reachable for the next month or two at +84 (that's the country code) 1265772662. Good luck & miss you all! xoxoxo Dayle & Adrian

The 1st Rule of MLB is -- You Don't Talk About MLB!

I was on my way to a snazzy office building in the CBD (central business district), to drop off some paper work to my 'handler'. Nothing big, just business forms and such, the usual paperwork anyone goes through when signing up with a temp agency. Like most days in downtown Melbourne, it gets hot and bright, so naturally I have my water and my Jays Cap on, pushing through the crowded streets.
In heat this bad no one smiles, it's all looks that cows make when they're cooped up in a pen. Blank stares, slow blinking, anything to save energy really.
You relish the time you have to stop at the intersection while the lights are changing, take a swig of warmer-than-pee water that was ice cold when you left the house. It's in these weird moments time crawls by, giving you what seems like eons to glance around and realize that you're the only one glancing around, studying all those jack-arsed faces - looking forward, slack mouths, blinking slowly, and trying to save energy.

On my return glance across the street is where I saw him, staring right into my eyes. It's the intrusive stare, the kind you first look away from but peek back to see if they've caught you. Yup, you're caught, next it's confusion; "Why me? Is he staring at me?! Maybe he's looking at someone behind me!".
The last thing you want is to be stopped by some crazy in the street that pulls you aside to preach about Mother Mia the Moon Goddess - especially in this heat. So you stare ahead like the others, focus on the walk light. But he's there, staring. Determined to make eye contact again, you can see him just out of the corner of your eye, staring you down like a mean old bull.

It's just before the light changes that I get the guts to look him in the eye with all the machismo I can muster.
Finally I clue into what's going on. Melbourne city dwellers hate wearing baseball caps. With all the heat baking my brain I wonder how I could've missed it. Looking over all those blank faces you'll never see one baseball cap - let alone an MLB cap.
The sea of colliding people stream toward each other from opposite sides of the street, bringing with it the staring dude-- wearing an Oakland A's cap, the green one with a bright yellow 'A'. A giant smile cuts across his face, mine too, our unspoken 'secret handshake'. Before the two sides meld, we both exchange a quick nod, then we're lost in a fury of people pushing, crossing, you have to keep up or be lost in the mess. On the other side safe, I look back briefly - nothing.
And for the 6 blocks I can't stop smiling.

Hotter than a certain fiery place!

Spending just a half hour on the payphone, chatting with the family out on the sweltering street in mid-afternoon nearly killed me today.

'How hot could it really be?' I thought. 'I must just be a big wimp!' I was inspired to check the weather, and found out it was actually 38 degrees (but with 19% humidity, it felt like 40). It's weird we get the hottest temperatures yet when we're so close to Antarctica-- but hey, the unofficial Melbourne slogan is "Four seasons in one day". And since us Canucks like to talk about the weather so much, we've linked to our weather [see "Our Favourite Links" on the left panel] so all of our readers can (A) get jealous (B) sympathize, or (C) laugh at us poor souls. Enjoy! -D.

It's been nearly a year blogging... and it's been so much fun! Thanks for following our travels, and we hope you'll keep up with us in 2008. We'll be updating our links and posting more frequent blogs in the coming months. We'd love to hear any suggestions, and thanks heaps to everyone who's sent us comments. Happy New Year! xoxoxo from BigQuestionmarks

Merry Xmas from us!

Melbourne Xmas (11)
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We've been soaking up the atmosphere of Melbourne for the past few days and loving it. Our first few days were a bit chilly, but it's definitely getting hotter (33 today, hotter than Cairns). We've even been taken by surprise by city sunburns, and we're now slathering on the sunscreen!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas-- we did, weird as it was to have no snow, no Xmas cookies, and no family nearby. (Miss ya all!) We spent Xmas Eve with our surrogate French family-- us and five Frenchies parked ourselves al fresco at a long table at an Italian restaurant hidden down a small cobblestoned side street in Melbourne's CBD (in Australia they call downtown "the CBD", aka Central Business District). We sat around eating yummy Italian food and drinking wine for more than five hours (those French like their long dinners-- apparently so do we!). Christmas Day was extra lazy... lazing in a giant hotel bed, watching movies on TV like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the live, Jim Carrey version, was actually pretty good!) and Babe ("That'll do, pig"). Then it was off to meet another international bunch for our good friend--and fellow pear-picker-- Andreas' last night in Melbourne. Andy's from East Germany (you may remember him from past blogs) and heaps of fun, and though we're super sad he's left us to explore South America, we're happy we managed to see him before he took off. With Andy, there were some lovely Italian ladies cooking the feast-- Anna and Marina-- and one Indian and one Malaysian girl to mix it up with a couple of Canucks. Good fun! Melbourne definitely has that international feel, much like Toronto did for us, so it's not hard to feel at home here. On Boxing Day, we dropped Andy off at the airport and then it was time to get onto apartment-hunting...our next true adventure, as it seems.

For those of you who have been to Melbourne before, you'll understand why we LOVE Fitzroy and hope to live there. It's artsy, bohemian, full of cool shops and bars, and just north of the CBD. But it's been a bit of a pain to be in the city with our van-- Adrian's become a brilliant parallel-parker and Dayle's been a super-awesome navigator--so we decided to move south to the beachy suburb of St. Kilda (where there's lots of parking) for a bit while we look for a more permanent place to live. We're in a hostel now-- hard to adjust the first night (how we LOVED our xmas hotel- Miami Hotel) but it's not a terrible place to sleep. Yesterday we went to the beach (not the greatest swimming beach, but hey, it's got sand) and had a nice breakfast out, and pretended we were tourists. Plenty of shopping and drinking temptations in St. Kilda-- it's a really cool neighbourhood, though we wish it was walking distance to downtown-- and we were highly entertained to encounter our first stray cats/prostitutes/drug dealers in ages. Good fun.

Last night we checked out our first apartment... errr, flat, I mean. Lovely sounding in the advertisement (as they always are): courtyard, washing machine, TV, fully furnished, short or long term stays OK. We got there and they forgot to mention: the kitchen stank and lacked a tap for hot water, the bedroom was sans curtains and had the air of a junkie palace, the bathroom was grunge central, there was a packet of rat poison sitting outside one bedroom door, and OH WAIT-- there wasn't a DOOR from the outside courtyard to the inside. It's unbelievable what people try to pass off as a "home". Daisy must have left some rubber on Fenwick Street-- we sped off as quickly as we could.

But, fingers crossed, we'll get out of bunk-bed life soon. For now, while the city is still asleep for the holidays, we'll take in as much beach and cappuccinos as we can (another great Aussie concept we've discovered: when a coffee's included in your breakfast, that means you can get an espresso, a cappuccino, whatever fancy coffee, etc). Soon enough, we'll be working and back to our normal city existences. And the jobs can't come fast enough, because Melbourne is full of exciting stuff to do and fantastic concerts to spend money on (and nooooooo Huntsman spiders, yippee)! Fingers crossed we can somehow get to Big Day Out to see Bjork and Rage Against the Machine at the end of January...