Sydney to Singapore

Although the area we were staying, Kings Cross, was a little bit seedy we really enjoyed our visit to Sydney. Almost half of the central bit of Sydney is a park. That alongside the harbor, the Opera House, the cafes and the sunshine made Sydney a pleasure to be in.

I was very impressed to find that in Sydney there are lots of Olympic size swimming pools that open to the public for next to nothing. This must be the reason why ordinary Australians swim incredibly quickly even in the slow lane. Steve and I went for a morning dip in an amazing pool overlooking the harbor and ended up in the "special" lane for the elderly or unfit.

If you want to see bats by the way forget Transylvania, Sydney's business district is the place to be. At dusk hundreds of bats take off from trees in the park and fly up towards the skyscrapers. Surreal but beautiful.

We were due to visit Caines after Sydney and see the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently its pretty hard to see much of the coral in torrential rain as it disturbs the water. As torrential rain was all that was forecast for the foreseeable future we changed our flights and after a brief stopover in Caines flew on to Singapore.

My preconceptions of Singapore were that there was no litter or chewing gum or crossing the roads at red lights because that sort of behavior led to a lengthly jail term. Steve had been to Singapore 10 years ago and had felt that people were looking at him disapprovingly, possibly because he had waist length hair and wore a sarong.

Singapore turned out to be very nice surprise. It's very clean (though there is some litter) and very green. Trees seem to have been planted in every conceivable space and Steve ended up taking nearly as many photos of the Esplanade arts center on the Singaporian water front as he did of the Sydney Opera house.

Orangutans now only live in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra. We had thought about making a quick visit to one of these islands to see the Orangutans but as we didn't really have enough time we decided to take the easy way out and go to Singapore's zoo instead. Singapore's zoo has one of the world's largest collections of captive Orangutans which they have been successfully breeding. The Orangutan enclosure is spacious and they are allowed out for a few hours each day to hang out in some nearby trees. We really enjoyed watching them, especially seeing the baby Orangutans play fight.

Singapore's zoo is definitely one of the better ones in terms of the way that the animals are kept. However we still saw a pair of distressed jaguar's pacing neurotically around around a tiny enclosure. I wasn't too sure about the ethics of keeping a polar bear either. There was a sign up proudly announcing that it was the only polar bear ever to have breed in the tropics. Personally I think that there are excellent reasons why polar bears don't breed in the tropics. I mean Steve and I were extremely hot in the zoo, even with frequent stops to sit down and have water so imagine being a huge furry bear!

Another great place in Singapore are the beautifully laid out Botanical Gardens. They have a lovely collection of orchids in the gardens and are responsible for breeding new hybrids of orchid. The VIP orchid garden is quite entertaining. It seems that in Singapore new orchid hybrids are named after visiting VIPs. Women's names seem to be preferred so they are usually named after a female VIP or the wife of a VIP, though some men do get lucky. Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth II, Laura Bush and Nelson Mandela are all on display though Margaret Thatcher was looking a bit withered.

Singapore also has an enormous number of huge and fiercely air conditioned shopping malls. Unable to withstand the bright shiny lights Steve bought a Playstation Portable (clearly an essential item to be carrying on a round the world trip) and I bought some new clothes.

We have now moved on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where we are going to spend a couple of days in a posh but relatively inexpensive hotel pretending not to be backpackers before heading on up the peninsular.

Melbourne

We flew into Melbourne to spend a relaxing week with Steve's family. Steve's aunt, Marlene, lives in Melbourne and Steve's mum Heather and her husband Willie had flown out from England so that we could have a family reunion.

The last time that we saw Heather and Willie was in London at a farewell party the day before we flew to Lima. Strangely it seemed entirely normal to meet up with them in the St Kilda area of Melbourne (which is quite similar to Clapham where we live in London except beside the sea and nicer) and go out for a coffee.

A lot of our journey so far has been spent either in the countryside, in small towns or in mega cities with unbreathable air. So in some ways arriving in Melbourne with its trams and water features and parks and works of modern architecture felt like a return to civilisation.

In the centre of Melbourne is a new development called Federation square. It's a mixture of different styles with four different types of facade one of which is multi colored. In fact, it almost looks as though four different architects came up with ideas for the square and unable to agree they decided to do them all at once. Everyone seems to have a different viewpoint about the square. I thought it looked like a giant funfair while Steve was staggered by the complexity, likely cost and the fact the client had agreed to it at all.

Across the river from Federation square is an area that reminded us very much of the south bank of the Thames in London. Melbourne's main art gallery and opera house are located there as is an unusual looking bridge. Walking down along the river side there are cafes and fountains and it all seems highly cultured until you arrive at huge temple to capitalism in the form of a mega casino, shopping and entertainment complex.

After betting 2.5 dollars at roulette and losing, I resisted the urge to gamble away all our travel money and went for a stroll around the casino with Steve. The casino was enormous, far larger than any other I have been in and absolutely packed with people. Most of them were playing away on coin machines with blank expressions on their faces. Although it was a nice sunny day outside in Melbourne there was no natural daylight in the casino so it could have been the middle of the night. Quite a scary place really.

Heather has some newly wed friends from Bombay who live in the Docklands area of Melbourne. Docklands is a newly developed area of Melbourne with sky scrapers and trendy restaurants. We went round to have dinner with them in their highrise appartment. Apparently in Bombay the tradition is that you drink and talk until about midnight and then have dinner before going home. It was great fun but we all ended up horribly drunk through four hours of drinking on empty stomachs and suffered for it in the morning!

On Easter Sunday we had dinner at Marlene's house in the Melbourne suburbs. Marlene and her husband Richard might have emigrated to Australia from India in the 1960s but Marlene can still cook excellent Indian food. We even got given an Easter egg each to take away!

Easter Monday was our first wedding anniversary. As we aren't planning any time in the Australian bush, to see animals the hard way, we decided to celebrate by going to a wildlife sanctury with Heather and Willie where we saw all the Kanagaroos, Wallabies, Tamsanian Devils and Koala bears that anybody could possibly hope for. We also checked out of our grotty hostel and moved into a nice hotel room instead!

While in Melbourne we tried out a couple of different places and have decided that the Australian backpacker scene definately isn't for us. Actually it's probably not for anyone with normal hearing who doesn't fancy drinking themselves into unconciousness every night. Unless of course your idea of fun is lying awake at night scratching your bed bug bites while listening to very drunk people singing, or you appreciate mould growing in a bathroom!

This morning we said goodbye to Heather and Willie at the airport and are now in Sydney where we are staying in a hotel in the red light district, Kings Cross. The sun is shining and it seems pretty lively with lots of bars, restaurants and some dodgy looking 'gentlemen's clubs'.

Doubtful Sound

Against all our expectations, as we took the bus from Christchurch to Queenstown the sun came out. On the way we got a brilliant view of Mt Cook, which at 3755m is the highest peak in Australasia, soaring above Lake Pukaki.

Queenstown has a pretty setting by a lake and has a reputation as a bit of a party town, with lots of young English people drinking themselves comatose. We spent the first night in an eight bed dormitory at the YHA hostel and the heavy snoring of three of our inebriated room mates as well as the sounds of a drunken fight coming from downstairs ensured that we had a truly terrible nights sleep.

The next day we walked up the hill beside the town and watched all the paragliders floating down. It's possible to try out practically every adventure sport that you can think of in Queenstown but as it costs lots of money and I'm afraid of heights anyway, we decided instead to take a bus on to Te Anau in Fiordland National Park to walk the 60km Kepler track.

Having learnt from the back breaking load that we carted around Torres del Paine National Park in Chile we started off down the Kepler track with relatively light packs.

The first day of the walk was sunny and the path lead around Lake Te Anau through the woods to Brod Bay. From Brod Bay we followed the track on a steep climb up through the forest and past some limestone cliffs to the top of the tree line. We then walked up across scrub land until we reached Luxmoore hut where we were spending the night. There were beautiful views from Luxmoore hut over Lake Te Anau and the South Fiord.

The second day of the walk was undoubtedly the most dramatic as we walked for four hours along a ridge surrounded by mountains with stunning views of the South Fiord. As the day went on it became clear that it was going to rain quite heavily and after a 1000m descent through woodland we made it to Iris Burn hut just as it started to pour. The hut was surrounded by lots of bird life and we could hear Kiwi birds calling during the night.

At dawn on the third day we were woken up by Keas screeching. The world's only Alpine parrot Keas look extremely cute but have a reputation for stealing hiking boots and just about anything else that they can find.

It rained pretty much the whole day as we walked through the forest and around Lake Manapouri to the road at Rainbow reach. The forest along the Kepler track is temperate rain forest, bursting at the seams with vegetation, and actually looked very pretty with the ferns and moss glistening in the rain. Still by the end of the day we had pretty much had enough of the rain and once we reached to the road we gladly took up the offer of three Swiss backpackers to drive us back to town in their camper van!

Wanting to get a closer look at a fiord before leaving Fiordland national park we decided to splash out on an overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound. The weather was very cloudy but in some ways that actually added to the dramatic and moody scenery along the fiord. Highlights were watching a pod of bottlenosed dolphins swimming, taking a kayaking trip and being fed lots of tasty food. We also saw New Zealand fur seals and some blue penguins, which briefly whizzed past our boat in a group.

Currently we are in Mount Cook national park, though Mount Cook itself is buried in the clouds. The plan, if the weather cheers up is to do some more walking before catching our flight to Melbourne on Monday.