I am currently sitting in an Internet cafe in a small town called Negombo. It is on the west coast very close to the airport which we will depart for in the early hours of the morning. Heather has gone into town leaving me to write. She has taken the guide book with her and therefore I will be having wild stabs at the spellings of place names and perfectly normal, easy-to-spell words also. I'm sure you have gathered from my previous interweb bloggings that I don't plan things out before writing, this is entirely intentional and leads to enthralling articles of wit, humour and loathing for you, the reader. Here is another:

Elephants, that's right, and that was when we were staying in Kandy wasn't it? Yes, ok so after that I think we headed to a place called Sigiria which is further north and forms part of The Cultural Triangle, which seems to amusingly consist of far more than three places. Now, when we were staying at Adam's Peak we had a bit of difficulty booking a place to stay in Sigiria and I finally succumbed to letting one of the staff there book me into his friend's hotel. I had a quick look at their website and the photos of the place looked nice so I went ahead. Later on we got a phone call from the owner of this hotel who told us he was in Kandy on business and could give us a "free" lift with him to the hotel. Being this far into a Sri Lankan holiday we considered ourself now wise to this word "free" and realised that the two and a half hour journey would no-doubt be riddled with stops at museums and temples with small donations being lost into pockets along the way. We decided it was worth it for the air-conditioned car. We were picked up from outside our Kandy guest house at half eight and drove off. After turning down a couple of offers of stopping to look at temples we passed a Hindu temple that was, granted, very impressive looking, and we hopped out to have a look. We went inside and were told to leave almost immediately, I'm pretty sure it was my fault. We hopped back into the car and drove off. An hour in, Sampath (the name of the hotel owner) pulled in off the country road into a landscaped tree-filled garden with some buildings at the back of it. He exclaimed that he was here to get some tea at this renowned herbal medicine garden and that we could get out and have a look if we wanted, but of course we didn't have to if we didn't want to. We chose not to and remained in the car, wise to his plot.  About two minutes passed and two men came out under the premise of getting a bottle of water from the car for Sampath. The usual "where are you from?" and facts about his many friends in Nottingham swam into the car and then it came; the full blown sales pitch about herbal medicine and how we would undoubtedly die a horrible death if we did not get out of the car and have a look around his garden. Heather feigned car sickness and I got out and walked with a man around the garden as he showed me various plants and herbs. Some of it was actually quite interesting and I got to see what a cocaine plant looked like and how pineapples grow. Then I was lead into the shop where a more intrusive guy, a "doctor", talked me through all the medicines; from some gunk that could cure baldness to a small red bottle which guaranteed you and your partner's simultaneous orgasm during intercourse. Tempted by the small red bottle I bought a concoction of massage oil to avoid being thrown to the Tamils and left, after giving the man who showed me around the garden a tip, which I of course had the option of not giving.

A smug Sampath got back in the car, a nice commission surely on his mind, and we were off again. We pulled into the hotel an hour or so later and were shown our room. The room was nice and was part of an attractive building of four big bedrooms. As far as I could tell the hotel consited of two four-bedroom buildings and a restaurant building. Chatting to Sampath later I discovered he had grand plans for twelve more rooms and swimming pool. Sampath was the second former tour-guide that we have met who has saved up and built a hotel. Two tours should have done it.

That afternoon we were off to visit Sigiria (Heather edit: Sigiriya) Rock, a massive rock surrounded by ancient gardens, painted with ancient frescoes and topped with an ancient pleasure palace. Heather told me the story which involved two brothers, one of whom was very angry when the other was given the throne. He vented his anger by walling up his father and leaving him to die and forcing his brother into exile, then built an impenetrable fortress on top of a big rock. When his brother gathered an army and attacked he decided he would come down from his inpeneterable fortress with his army and fight them on a flat plane. He was clever one. The elephant he rode upon bolted and he ran away in shame and got a job in Tescos.

Sampath gave us a lift to the start of Sigiria Rock's gardens and gave us the choice of whether or not we wanted a guide. We really didn't and managed to shake a stubborn one from us eventually. Heather bought tickets which covered most attractions within the Cultural Triangle and weren't cheap, so we felt justified in not putting anything in any of the donation boxes seeing how we had probably just paid for a couple more hotels.

The Rock, I feel, was the most impressive man-made structure I have seen on this trip. I am referring to the stairs up it and the fortress on top, not the rock itself. I am always fascinated by the "nutter" urges humans have when they see a big mountain or a massive rock and think "I'm going to build something on that, it is big and high and must be somehow connected to God". We were forewarned that there had been some hornet attacks on tourists a couple of weeks prior, fatal I think, and so we were a little apprehensive about straying from main track. No hornets came our way though. Up a steep metal spiral staircase put in by the British were the remnants of paintings of topless woman. (Heather edit: the famous "Sigiriya damsels", which provide fodder for 99.6% of Sri Lankan souvenirs.) Very well-endowed topless women who would no doubt lead to much disappointment for teenage boys when they first managed to remove a girl's top.

Further up from the paintings were the remains of a giant lion which originally had a stone staircase leading through its mouth to the the top of the rock. The angry brother suffered from vertigo and had walls put in around the stairs when they were originally carved into the rock. Now, however, there were just flimsy metal railings. We climbed up and explored the top, which along with spectacular vistas consisted of many swimming pools (Heather edit: swimming pools?!) and ruined buildings.

That evening we did our usual trick of having dinner in a really fancy hotel and went to bed. The next cultural excursion was to a place called Polamanoora. (Heather edit: Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka's second great capital, which was at its peak around the 11th Century AD. ) Here were the remnants of many a temple. We were to hire bikes to cycle around, but first hopped on to a bus for a one-and-a-half hour journey there. We hired bikes from a small guest house. The bikes had seen better days. Mine was a couple of sizes to small and had over 60 gears; 59 of them did nothing and 1 stopped the bike from functioning. We cycled off along the main road for about 300m and hung a right into the park type place where all the ruins were. The roads in Sri Lanka are manic, to drive here you must master the art of beeping the horn as much as you can and overtaking anything regardless of what is coming the other way. If you spy danger you beep some more. We showed our tickets and cycled comically in. The paths were all sandy and uneven and the sun was beating down. The ruins were impressive, and to think that some were almost 1000 years old was thought-provoking. Giant decayed statues and vast ruined temples, all of which you took your shoes off at before you entered. This was fine except the stone of some of the floors was so hot I'm sure you could have fried a poppadom on them. Heather had grasped the concept of forward motion better than me and was airily cycling between the ruins. I was drenched and throwing jealous looks at people in air-conditioned taxis. Eventually the cycling in the heat up and down hills got the better of us and we had had our fill of ruins for the day. We returned our bikes, grabbed some lunch and got back on a bus.

Our bedroom smelt a bit musty, the bathroom was one of those wet-rooms, but the floor did not slope quite correctly so the water just gathered and stagnated in pools on the floor. There was also a pungent aroma of filth in the air, this emanated from the remains of that massage oil I bought which was one of the foulest substances I have smelt. I don't know why I feel the need to tell you this stuff. The next day we were off to a town called Dambulla. Dambulla was only a short tuk-tuk ride away and is home to some cave temples. Luckily a guy accosted us for tickets early (the cave temples were not included on our all-inclusive ticket) and we bought a couple before heading up the many steps to our destination. An important person in Sri Lankan history (Heather edit: King Valagamba) once hid out in these caves when he was overthrown, and then when he regained power he made the caves into temples by having them painted ornately inside.

The low hung ceilings of the varying sized caves covered many statues of Buddha - we'd been told that if a big Buddha is lying on his side and one of his feet is flush with the other foot then he is resting; if one of his feet is slightly below the other foot then he is dead. 

This Buddha is a dead Buddha, his feet tell me so.

We came back down from the caves and started back down the stairs, where we came across a French couple who hadn't been lucky enough to find the hidden ticket booth and faced having to climb all the way back down to get some tickets. We gave them ours in true Sri Lankan style.

That afternoon we did nothing, I read my book and whittled a small wooden elephant that I had bought in its rough form way back in Merissa. (Heather edit: Marissa.) Heather did some knitting and also read. Heather knitting has caused much fascination to Sri Lankans, especially to an army woman at one of the road side check-points.

This one is not my elephant, this is a photo from Heather's previous blog, when we went to that woodworking place. I deem it a more interesting photograph than ones of hills and things.

Off to our penultimate destination, Anahradapura. (Heather edit: close! Anuradapura.) We decided to take the bus again, and asked a tuk-tuk driver to take us to the bus station. He took us to an ordinary bus stop, which was highly annoying as it meant we would not get a seat. Heather joined a child on a fold down seat in the aisle and I sat on top of a pile of bags. As people filtered off along the journey we eventually got seats. An hour and half later we arrived in town and grabbed a tuk-tuk to our hotel. After a brief problem with the hotel not having our booking we were shown to a temporary room, and then to a more permanent room. This place was nice, we had a four poster bed each, carved out of a beautiful dark wood and even a separate room for our luggage. Heather had splashed out a bit for our last place of interest (not that Negombo isn't interesting, it does after all have an internet cafe). We chilled a bit after I performed my arriving-at-a-new place ritual of undressing down to my pants and turning the air-con up full blast. We went for a wander before tea amidst monkeys and dogs, around one of the big man-made lakes that the locals call tanks. Many people were bathing in the lakes and we felt a bit intrusive walking by. A Poya day, or moon day, had just passed, which is a day where people flock to a place of religious interest to celebrate something that Buddha did, I think this one was maybe the day he became enlightened. We were treated to the ever-familiar rice and curry in the evening and it was a very tasty version with some new exciting dishes.

I won't attempt to spell the name of the place we are staying in again but it was once home to an ancient city which now lies in ruin. (Heather edit: it was the first of Sri Lanka's ancient capitals, founded at some point between 10 and 5 BC.) We were to hire a couple more bikes and cycle around it. Learning from last time, we did it early in the morning to avoid the full heat of the sun, and the bikes we hired from our hotel were half decent; Heather's even had a basket. The hotel was slap bang in the middle of everything and we didn't have to cycle far before we came to the first point of interest. The roads were flatter here and the cycling pleasurable. The ruins of the city thousands of years old seemed in remarkable condition and the bathing pools looked as though they just needed a bit of clean before they could be used again. We walked through old monks' residences and around huge brick dagobas that would have originally been blazing white due to the plaster they would have been covered in. According to the guidebook one of the dagobas is the largest brick structure in the world and consists of enough bricks to build a three metre wall from London to Edinburgh. 

Ah ... I really am a twat.

We leisurely cycled back to the guest house and freshened up. We headed into town and got some lunch at a locally popular bakery come restaurant and treated ourselves to coconut cake and date cake for afters. We had a bit of a rest and then ate again back at the guest house. After photographing many monkeys we went to bed.

The trip from Anahrad..etc etc to Negombo was due to take four and half hours on the bus and would involve many changes. (Heather edit: one.) We thought, seeing how this was our last long journey, we would book a taxi for the trip. We bartered a price which I have no idea was fair or not and it picked us up at 8.30. This morning in fact. Nothing really of interest happened on the journey, it was a mix of rubbly rough road and decent coast road. We pulled into Negombo around lunch time and settled in, we will be awaking at 2am for airport fun.

Heather will be gallivanting off on yet another trip to Jordan in a few days with her Mum, and I will make sure that she keeps blogging about it, so please keep reading. I am a little travelled out and will be retiring back to Edinburgh and trying to make some money. I hope you have enjoyed reading our (I now realise) rather cynical blog postings about our Sri Lanka experiences and I hope also you will continue to read about any future selfless trips we plan.

Postcard worthy I feel, H took it on the drive back from Adam's Peak, thought it deserved a spot in the blog.

Having picked our way along the South coast we next headed for the Hill Country, Sri Lanka's lush, craggy heartland, crisscrossed by perilously narrow mountain roads and dotted with tea plantations. Our first stop was Ella, reputedly Sri Lanka's most beautiful village, which is only about 70 km from Tissa (going by the highly scientific method of measuring the map with my fingers), but the journey took us four hours and three buses. On the final leg our bus ground to an abrupt halt amidst confused shouts and we were asked to go up and identify our luggage - with the end of the civil war still less than a year ago, tight security occasionally rears its head.

Looking back at some of my earlier posts, I don't seem to be very good at conveying how striking, awe-inspiring or otherwise impressive something is - I have a feeling I made the Great Barrier reef sound like a mildly diverting swimming spot, and Ayers Rock seem positively disappointing. Let me say upfront, then, that the Hill Country is beautiful: verdant, varied and dramatic. It's the kind of place where monkeys cross the road in front of you, and you turn a corner only to see the landscape tumbling into the haze below.

Mike communing with nature.

Ella comprises a single street lined with hones, shops and cafes, as well as a handful of guesthouses perched on the slopes above. We stayed at the Rawana Holiday Resort (a name which makes it sound like a faceless, sprawling complex, rather than a family-owned guesthouse with half a dozen rooms), which I chose solely on the reputation of its garlic curry. Ella's meant to be one of the best places in the island to try Sri Lankan home-cooking, and it didn't disappoint - we even got to watch the cook at Rawana prepare the evening meal while he talked us through the various dishes, and he promised to email us the recipes (if you eat round at ours in the next couple of months, prepare to have a plate of curried garlic cloves inflicted on you).

The next morning, in an uncustomary fit of virtue, we decided to climb Little Adam's Peak, a vantage point with great views of Ella Rock, which dominates the local landscape. The path meanders through tea plantations (fresh tea leaves, it transpires, neither look nor smell anything like tea), past a ramshackle tea pickers' village, and round a slightly foreboding-looking green gate, which sparked much bickering over whether the instruction "pass the green gate" meant to go through it or to walk on by it. On the way back down again we were lured into a pretty guesthouse-come-cafe by signs promising passion fruit juice and lemon cake. The owner, an incredibly friendly man, was amused by our stab at a few Sinhala words (unchecked hilarity is a fairly typical reaction), and gave us an impromptu language lesson, with the result that we can now say such useful tings as, "do you have change for 1000 rupees?" and, "no, I absolutely, definitely don't want whatever it is you're trying to sell me, please be so kind as to b*gger off" (that may not be the direct translation, but you get the general idea). We ended up going back to his for dinner, another delicious take on rice and curry which this time included pittu, a coarse, almost couscous-like substance made from grated coconut and rice flour.

Speaking of Sri Lankan specialities, I thought I'd show you a typical breakfast, this particular one also having been eaten in Ella:

From right to left the bowls hold egg curry (soft-boiled eggs crushed into a deliciously savoury curry sauce), coconut sambol and dahl, while on the plate you can see hoppers, string hoppers (the ones that look like discs of noodles) and roti - this roti was exceptionally good; I think it might have had coconut in it.

After a couple of days of happily gorging ourselves thus, we waved goodbye to Ella and set off for a tiny village called Dalhousie. The views from the train were stunning - or at least, they were if you failed to get a seat and spent the four hour trip sitting in the permanently open carriage door (slightly less dangerous than it sounds, as most of the time the train chugs along fairly sedately, regularly outstripped by passing butterflies [I think I've stolen that line from one of the Harry Potter books; oh, the shame]). The route included half a dozen tunnels, and every time we went through one the local children screamed and whooped as if they were on a rollercoaster. (Have I mentioned how endearing most Sr Lankan children are? The little ones shout an enthusiastic "hello!" when we pass them on the street, followed immediately by "bye bye!", while older children stare wide-eyed at us on buses, smiling shyly if we catch their eye.)

About halfway into the trip Mike got talking to a local journalist, and they spent the next couple of hours comparing notes on respective cultures, societies and spice tolerances. Bandara (that being his name) also introduced us to train sacks (Mike's particularly taken with the breads stuffed with spiced potato, which rejoice in the unhelpfully non-descriptive name of "buns") and let us know when our station came up, which was handy as there are no announcements, and Roman alphabet signs are few and far between. By the time we pulled into Hatton Mike had landed himself a commission to write a short article for the Daily News - not bad for someone who's only bought a newspaper once in his life. 

As luck had it, a bus bound for Dalhousie met the incoming train, and a scenic - if slightly nerve-wracking - 75 minutes later we arrived at our guesthouse. Dalhousie only really exists to provide a base for those climbing Sri Lanka's most famous mountain. Remember Little Adam's Peak? This is its big (BIG) brother, and although at about 7,500 feet it's actually only the country's fifth highest peak, its status as the home of Buddha's footprint ensures a steady stream of pilgrims during the dry season: this is Sri Laka's second most sacred Buddhist site. (Number one, in case you were wondering, is the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, which houses a relic claimed to be - logically enough - Buddha's tooth. Apparently tooth trumps footprint.) Incidentally, Muslim tradition holds that the footprint was in fact made by Adam - hence Adam's Peak - and the mountain is a holy place for them too, as indeed it is for Hindus and even Christians. Sri Lankans have got religious pluralism down to a fine art.

We'd heard plenty of horror stories about the Adam's Peak climb, not least from the guidebook itself, which paints it as a gruelling ordeal "which reduces even seasoned hillwalkers to quivering wrecks". Being about as far from a seasoned hillwalker as you can get without actually being bedridden, this did not fill me with enthusiasm. Nor did the book's orders that we rouse ourselves at 2am to get cracking. Even at this time in the morning there were already dozens of people making their way down - the pilgrims we passed were an eclectic mix of monks wearing hoodies over their saffron robes, families with small children, groups of teenage boys with beanies plled up high on their heads, making them look curiously like smurf hats (for someone who's only ever seen half an episode of the Smurfs I seem to reference it an awful lot), and people supporting the elderly or infirm - we even saw one (unaided) guy with what looked like a broken foot, which effectively quashed my right to complain. It wasn't actually that bad, though - not exactly a walk in the park (unless your local park features 5500+ increasingly steep, often crumbling steps), but it certainly never felt unachievable. It's undeniably atmospheric, too - the path is dimly lit and sprinkled with all-night stalls selling baffling useless tat (can you think of any circumstances in which you'd want to buy a luminous pink chihuahua toy before setting off up a mountain?), as well as plenty of tea shops - we stopped at one to refuel on rroti fresh from the griddle, and were plied with tooth-achingly sweet milky tea by the owners, who looked a bit taken aback to see us. Including stops, it took us just over two and a half hours to reach the summit (as opposed to the four stated in the guidebook - maybe it was written by the guy with the broken foot) , where dozens of people were already sitting huddled against walls, wrapped in towels, many of them asleep. As well as a small collection of buildings (one of which contains the distinctly anti-climatic footprint) the summit boasts two large bells, which visitors ring once for each successful ascent they've made. Having given our single rings (which sounded a bit feeble when a couple of people after us rang thirteen times apiece) we settled down to wait for sunrise. This, you see, is the reason most of the non-religious tourists make the climb: once the sun has risen, a mysterious shadow of Adam's Peak is visible for twenty minutes or so, seemingly floating in the air. I say "mysterious" because the shadow does't actually correspond to the shape of the mountain, a discrepancy I have yet to see a convincing explanation for.

The descent was easier-going, though not much quicker, and once back we spent the rest of the day just relaxing. The following morning it was straight off to Kandy, the country's second largest city. Unlike the rest of Stri Lanka, the kingdom of Kandy fell neither to the Portuguese nor the Dutch, and it wasn't until 1815 that the British finally got their hands on it (not through any particular merit of their own - Kandyans were apparently so dissillusioned with their brutish king that they stood aside to let the invaders past). The city's chief sight is the aforementioned Temple of the Tooth complex, but as visitors aren't actually permitted a glipse of the fabled tooth (which, rumour has it, looks suspiciously animal-like) we didn't feel compelled to go in. Instead we spent the afternoon checking out a few handicrafts shops, the highlight of which (as testified to by the fact that Mike didn't object to being in the shop for longer than tirty seconds) was a place called Rajanima Crafts, where you can see master woodcarvers working on the gorgeous custom furniture they sell (including, to the obvious amusement of the staff, a throne comissioned by a Dutch moneylender, who's even created a crest for himself to have carved all over it. Classy). Some pieces are painted using hues created from an extraordinary substance called rainbow wood: the sawdust is placed in water to which various natural materials (such as iron, lime juice or chalk) can be added to produce a startling array of vivid colours.

That evening we'd arranged - with a certain amount of trepadition - to go along to a so-called "cultural show". These are staged by a few venues in town and are basically a showcase for traditional Kandyan dancing and drumming, witha couple of low country dances and a bit of firealking thrown in for good measure. Approximately one hundred and ninety three people attempted to sell us tickets in the street: clearly the thought of a tourist slipping through the net and not going along is unthinkable. Overall, though, we were a bit underwhelmed by the performance - most of the dancers didn't seem particularly professional, and the promised spectacular acrobatics never really materialised. The Mask Dance was probably the highlight - originally an exorcism dance, the performers wear huge demonic-looking painted wooden masks, smaller versions of which have become a quintissestial Sri Lankan souvenir.

The next day - yesterday, in fact (yes, oh patient ones, the end is in sight!) we hired a driver (I feel very swish typing that) and drove about forty kilometres west of Kandy to - drumroll please! - Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. This, those of you who know me well will not be remotely surprised to hear, was one of the main reasons for coming to Sri Lanka in the first place. I'd originally been planning on working as a volunteer at the orphanage for a couple of weeks, but eventually decided against it because a) I worried I wouldn't get to see much else of the island, b) they stopped offering accommodation, and c) they placed rather too much emphasis on dung-shovelling duties for my liking. Still, here we were as visitors, having carefully timed our trip to tie in with the morning feeding session, which we thought would be the least busy of the three - maybe it is, but it was still packed. Our guidebook had promised that for a small extra payment you could bottle-feed a baby elephant yourself, and signs up at the ticket desk confimed this - I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. When we tried to buy feeding tickets, though, we were baldly told that we couldn't, with no further explanation. This wasn't going according to plan. The feeding session wasn't what we'd expected either - rather than alll of the orphanage's 70-odd elephants, only two calves were present, chained inside a pen (apparently even the elephants in the national zoo here are chained), and, gallingly, we had to just look on as people who had mysteriously managed to procure tickets took turns feeding them - our driver later told us that tour guides buy up all the feeding tickets for their groups before anyone else can get a look in. Hmmph! Luckily, though, he managed to bribe one of the supervisors into letting us groupless scum take a turn (finally, the system works in our favour!) - mission accomplished! And I've never seen anyone so excited to get an extra serving of milk.

After the feeding we got to see the rest of the residents roaming around, a couple of pachyderm celebrities among them: Raja, an enormous blind tusker, and Sama, who lost a foot when she stepped on a landmine and has been making her way around on three legs ever since. Here only the working elephants (many of them help out around the orphanage) or the particularly mischievous ones were wearing chains, and you could get extremely close to many of them (staff would head you of if it looked like you were actually going to touch an elephant, which I originally assumed was for safety reasons, but it turned out it was so they could charge tips from anyone wanting contact. Business as usual). We then headed across the road to to banks of the Ma Oya river, where the elephants take their thrice daily baths. Watching them being driven, three or four abreast, along the road to the river is quite a sight - more than once we only got out of the way just in time, as a huge elephant lumbered onto the spot of the pavement where we'd been standing seconds before. Many of them pressed right up to us, their trunks searching the crowd hopefully for food.

Having watched the elephants in the water for half an hour or so I reluctantly said goodbye, and we drove a few kilometres back towards kandy to the Millennium Elephant Foundation, which is home to a handful of retired working elephants, as well as a couple of young 'uns. (By which I mean teens and twenty-somethings rather than calves.) There's a small but absorbing museum stuffed with facts about elephants, including a chart showing the 90 or so pressure points an elephant will respond to and the twenty words which working elephants are taught. (Erm taught to understand, that is, not to speak. Obviously.) The guidebook had told us, somewhat vaguely, that we'd be able to "interact" with elephants here - it turned out that this means being taken for a quick (and decidedly uncomfortable) elephant ride, and then helping to give our steed (can an elephant be a steed?) a bath, scrubbing his skin with coconut husks. His contribution to the proceedings was to spray us liberally withwater every now and then.

Phew! It took me well over an hour to type all that; does that automatically disqualify me from 95% of temp jobs?

Right, blog; Heather left us off at Galle, and this, my loyal three readers, is where I will continue from.

We packed our bags and said cheerio to the nice family hosting us at their Galle guest house, they remarked  on our light packing, on hindsight I think I would have packed even lighter and forgone the clothes. We were originally going to get on a bus to our next destination, Dalawela but on discovering it was only 7km away we got a tuk-tuk, which are surprisingly comfortable to travel in due to the nice breeze that is created. Old hats now at checking into guest houses we entered our room, no A/C but amazing view of the beach, a beach which we then set off to swim at.  Although a scattering of westerners existed on this beach it was relatively un-touristy, and a few locals seemed to be swimming also in the natural swimming pool created by the reefs. We shunned this natural swimming pool and decided we wanted waves and so set of further down the beach. A spittoon of rocks which seemed to effectively dissuade most tourists from going further divided populated beach from unpopulated beach. The waves here were impressive and very close in to the shore. Some locals were waving at us, I signed to them whether or not it was ok to swim here, and they replied in english, "try further down". We found an idyllic spot all to ourselves and went into the sea. Lovely, we amused ourselves in the waves. Upon getting out a local friendly man came running up to us and told us that is was very dangerous where we were swimming and that his brother had been attacked by  big fish in that spot. I think by "big fish" he meant sea monster; we are such rebels.

Palm tree avec twat.

Later that evening we had dinner at the guest-house we were staying at. Fresh caught lobster no less. The evening was ruined slightly though by some prat deciding that everyone eating would like to be bathed in his music collection from his laptop he had kindly bought to dinner. Afterwards we had a nice evening stroll along the beach, admiring the fishermen-less stick-fisher sticks stuck all along the coast.

We only stayed one night in Dalawela and the next morning we headed off towards Mirissa, a slightly more famous, more popular south coast beach. This time we traveled both by tuk-tuk and bus, the latter was surprisingly bareable; I had images of people crammed in and hanging off the roof but we got a seat and the breeze through the windows made everything pleasant. We arrived at Mirissa about an hour later. We had to get another tuk-tuk to the place we were staying as the map was lieing again - once we were there we saw we had a cabana (a wooden hut) down a little path from the beach. It looked lovely from the outside, unfortunately on the inside it looked a bit unfinished and grubby, with a large gap around the top to the outside where the conicular roof sat on rafters; this did not bode well for mosquitoes and that first night the bite record was set and the mozzie-suit invented.  Our main reason for visiting Mirissa was not really the beach however, but for whale watching, and February is a good time to catch the pod of blue whales migrating. We had our session booked for the following day at 1pm and spent the rest of the day on the beach swimming and reading.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrawr!

All the beach-side eateries offered western food and more often than not you had to ask if you wanted something local. The pace of life here was slow, and it was common to wait up to an hour for your food to come.

The next morning we set out to Mirissa Watersports, the company who we would be seeing whales with. I informed Heather we should take a right and walk to the main road where we take a left, we did this and then caught a tuk-tuk which promptly did a u-turn and headed back the way we came and about 200m past the point we started to our destination. Unsurprisingly Mirissa Watersports was full of tourists all wanting to spot a whale, we took our seats and waited our turn.

Once our boat was ready ( a converted fishing boat with comfortable seating for about 15 folk) we got on board and headed off out to sea. All the small fishing boats here are painted bright funky colours making the harbours really pretty, I think it only works in sunshine though. Heather and I had only had breakfast thinking we would get a late lunch so we were both feeling a little sea-sick with only water in our stomachs. An hour and half of motoring out looking out for whales became tiring, I spotted a couple of flying fish but was starting to think that we might not see any whales. I lay down and fell asleep ...

"Whale is come!  Whale is come!" shouted the man prodding me out of my slumber - I got up, remembered where I was and went to the front of the boat. In the distance I could see a small jet of water spray up from the surface. As we got closer we saw the back of a blue whale arching out of the water like a massive upturned black bathtub. "Diving! Diving! Tail! Tail!" shouted the guide, and the bathtub arched and submerged, sprouting a massive tail which crashed into the water just like in the movies. Awesome. About 10-15minutes later there was more pointing and shouting and we chased down another spray of water. All in all we saw 4 whales I think, or maybe the same whale 4 times. It was now about 4.30pm and we were both very hungry and sick feeling. Finally the boat turned and we started to head back. The sea got quite choppy and the only way I found of avoiding throwing up was to lie flat on my back and fall asleep. Sploosh!  A wave came over the boat and landed on me waking me up, I was suddenly cold, a sensation I hadn't expected to feel for another 2 weeks or so, soon I was too cold and went to see where Heather was. After panicking slightly when I couldn't find her on the small boat, I realised she had managed to get herself invited into the cabin where she was snuggled up under a towel in one of the berths. It seemed to take ages to get back, we finally arrived at the harbour around 7:30pm, having left at 1pm. We were both hungry and a bit queezy. I also had burnt my knees, a good achievement I thought.  We got some food and went to bed pretty early that night.

The next day after a good breakfast of curd, pancakes and omlettes on the beach we prepared ourselves for a 3 hour bus drive to our next destination, Tissamaharama, or Tissa for short. Tissa is further east along the south coast but a bit more inland. The bus driver showed us that we could stash our bags under the seats to free up room to breath and sold us our tickets to Tissa. There was plenty of eye-candy outside to while away some time including stick fishermen (actually that was maybe on the last bus journey) and pretty shacks etc. 3 hours of semi sleep and one numb buttock later we pulled in to Tissa.

We hopped into a tuk-tuk and were joined by a friendly conman claiming to work at our guest house. He kindly ignored our attempts to get rid of him and joined us down the sandy track to Vikum Lodge. Upon arriving and confirming our guest did not work here we went to our room. Ahhhhhhhhh, air conditioning, and toilet that kind of flushes (I forgot to mention that in the cabana the toilet didn't enjoy flushing). We settled in. Tissa is close to a national park called Bundala which we planned to visit in the morning. We knew (Heather knew) that we needed to hire a jeep and a driver in order to get into the park; we thought we would walk into town to make some enquiries. When we left the room we were delighted to find our little friendly conman still waiting for us trying to get us to take his jeep, informing us that another English boy from another hotel (in the tuk-tuk on the way over the English boy was staying at our hotel) was wanting to come as well so it would all be cheaper. We finally managed to shake him off by taking his phone number. Heather informs me that it is considered extremely rude to lose face here, and I have never seen anyone getting angry and have never felt at danger, I just find myself getting annoyed a lot as a fair few people will lie through their teeth to try and get something out of you.

There are lots of stray dogs here, there were lots in Mirissa too on the beach, but the ones here seem to be a bit more hostile, it definitely makes you feel on edge passing packs of dogs lying in the road. After an hour of looking around for jeeps and getting some prices we headed back to the guest house to ask the receptionist as he had a good grasp of English and seemed pretty trustworthy. It is very hot here, I think it is the hottest place we have been so far.

Once we had our national park tour booked for 5:30 the next morning (wooo) we chilled a bit, grabbed some food at  fancy looking hotel nearby and got an early night.

The alarm awoke us and we picked up our packed breakfasts and headed out to the jeep and driver waiting on us. The journey to the park was fun. We were sitting in the back an open topped jeep driving through the cool night. The sun was rising when we arrived at the park, we picked up a mandatory paid guide before driving through Jurrasic-Park-esque gates which marked the entrance. Bundala National Park is famous mainly for its bird life although there are  few elephants wondering around also so we hoped to spy one. We rolled back the canvas cover on top of the jeep and stood up for the full 360 degree safari experience. Weird and wonderful birds were in abundance alongside an awful lot of peacocks. I've seen plenty of peacocks before but I have never seen them perched in trees or flying around making noises like cats.  

We spotted a giant sea eagle soar past and then in the water a crocodile who obligingly crossed the road for us. Monkeys were also everywhere and got very excited at the sight of us and started leaping and bouncing around the trees manically, some of the older more wise monkeys just chilled and observed us.  

Still no elephant sitings but our driver spied recent droppings and we headed of the track to explore, unfortunately no elephants, but we spied some wild boar and a few land monitors and also a rare spotting of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Our guest house owner had made us packed breakfasts consisting, to Heather's delight, of cheese sandwiches; I ate both hers and mine and then felt a little sick for the drive back.  We are still determined to see some elephants in the wild so plan on visiting another national park further north where there are hundreds of them as oposed to the 10 or so in Bundala.

Back to Tissa and an afternoon of doing as little as possible, read a couple more chapters of my book (Dumbeldore and Harry have just entered the cave) and wallowed in the air conditioning.

Towards 5pm we walked down the dirt path from our guest house and attempted to hail a bus. We were off to Kataragama, a place held sacred by Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike. I first flagged down a school bus, which obligingly stopped but only so everyone on board could point and laugh at us before driving off tooting. The second bus ignored my feeble wave and drove straight past but the third bus stopped and let us on.  We were standing most the way holding on to the ceiling bars to prevent death. People sitting down on a crowded bus hold the stuff of people standing up which is nice.  About 30 minutes later we pulled into the dusty looking town of Kataragama and started hunting for the sacred land, basically a big park consisting of three main temples, one for each religion I mentioned previously.  To get to the park we walked through rows of stands selling arranged bowls of fruit, these were tempting but it soon transpired that these were offerings for the Buddhist temple. We crossed over a river with pilgrims bathing themselves (people come from far and wide to do this) and into a park. The park looked like a once lush European park hit by excessive global warming. We were ushered into the Muslim mosque and shown around kindly.  An enthusiastic man also showed us some photos that had been taken of him  in various yoga contortions by some previous tourists. It seemed he showed us them purely out of pride for them which was touching.  After the obligatory temple donation we headed off to the larger Buddhist part. We took off our sandals and entered the sandy expanse. This temple was primarily a shrine to Kataragama, symbolised by a trident. 

The temple was centered around the usual Bo tree surrounded by golden gating, which symolised the tree where Buddha became enlightened under. Around the tree was another small tree and some central buildings with monks a-wandering. The ground was all covered in sand and surrounded by tall walls supported by elephant statues and topped with models of peacocks (Kataragama had a penchance for peacocks and in days of yore they were regularly sacrificed to him).  In front of the central cluster of buildings were two flat stones on the ground with fencing around them. One had a sign of a spear and the other a trident. People would queue up in front of these stones holding a burning coconut, praying. They would then proceed to smash the coconut on the stone. If the coconut did not break then this was bad. It was entertaining to watch old women calmly prey and then suddenly go mental, smashing down the coconut with all their might.  Drums and bells were continuously sounding and there was a large crowd of people queuing up to donate their fruit.  We read that dancing was supposed to be happening later but we though we would try and grab something to eat and then come back.

Walking through the many stands selling everything from teddy bears to weird and wonderful food stuffs we stopped at a local sweet stand and bought some oil cake (a gelatinous brown coconut thing, which is tasty) and some ambiguous bright red stuff which looked like crispy fried beef from a British -Chinese takeaway, which we deduced was crystalised dried sugar. We spied a woman cooking hoppers (bowl shaped crispy pancakes) and wandered over to impose ourselves on her. She didn't speak a word of English but luckily a man and his family sitting down eating the hoppers spoke perfect english and invited us to join him. He lived in England for 7 years and we chatted about old computers and the whereabouts of the tea-plantation where Heather's Grandmother was born. After this friendly interlude we walked back to the Buddhist temple but things were dying down. We found the correct bus and climbed on board. An hour and a half of waiting later and the bus finally drove off for the half hour ride back. The bus went straight past the guest house and into the town itself, leaving us to navigate back in pitch darkness the 1.5km to bed. Luckily Heather, being her highly organised self, had bought a torch. A long day meant falling asleep was easy.

Wooof, that was a long blog, congratulations for reading this far. I forgive you if you only looked at the photos, that's what I would do. 

Colombo, Sri Lanka's dusty, sprawling, noisy, hectic capital, doesn't feature high on most visitors' to-do lists, and we only see a scant handful of tourists in the two days we're there. Our main reason for stopping over is to re-group after the flight (which, incidentally, we came within about two minutes of missing - the staff felt that putting  out a boarding call might delay their lunch break. Kuwait Airways: where the customer comes second to a sandwich).

After negotiating our fast becoming traditional aarrg-I-can't-take-any-money-out-of-the-ATMs panic (not the result of chronic disorganisation this time - bureaux de change don't seem to sell Sri Lankan rupees in the UK, as you can't bring more than about  £30-worth into the country) we take a taxi to our guesthouse and then head straight over the road for breakfast. Like all Sri Lankan meals, breakfast is customarily eaten with your hands (or rather, hand), which supposedly enhances your appreciation of the food's flavours and textures, but is a slightly daunting prospect when the food in question is curry. (Yup, curry for breakfast. I think it was at this point that Mike decided he was going to like Sri Lanka.) Surprisingly, though, eating dhal, sambol and sauces with your fingers proves eminently do-able, especially when you have chapattis, lentil dougnuts and string hoppers - little disks of tangled rice noodles - to help you.

Colombo's a bit short on specific sights, but the guidebook mentions a couple of interesting-sounding temples, so we grab a tuktuk and head off to check them out. Sri Lankan taxis can't be hailed on the street, you need to call one in advance, whereas tuktuks (which, slightly confusingly, call themselves taxis) crowd the streets, painted in either beige or bright primary colours, and further embellished according to the driver's whim, which could mean anything from a solitary Hello Kitty sticker to a fully-fledged shrine decked out with garlands of plastic flowers. I was expecting a tuktuk ride to be a bone-jangling, death-defying experience, especially considering that road lanes in Colombo are treated as mild-mannered suggestions rather than dictates, but they're surprisingly comfortable. No, the real problem with tuktuks is that none of the drivers seem to have the faintest idea where you want to go, even if a) it's a local landmark, and b) you point it out on a map. They don't let this curious ignorance of their own city deter them from taking your custom though, preferring to stop occasionally at the roadside to consult helpful strangers.

Anyway, the temples! Sri Lanka claims to be the world's oldest Buddhist country, and is home to an accordingly vast number of Buddhist temples, of which our first port of call - Gangaramaya - is purportedly the most bizarre. Founded in the nineteenth century, it's received thousands of gifts from well-wishers over the years, all of which are proudly displayed, and as the donations range from ivory bananas to vintage cars this makes for a slightly surreal, inescapably kitch atmosphere. More excitingly (from my point of view, at least), Gangaramaya has a resident temple elephant, who was being hosed down in the courtyard when we arrived. At first I just stood there taking an excessive number of photos, but after a while the keeper - possibly sensing the waves of desperation emanating from me - beckoned me over and let me feed the elephant some sweetcorn, pat his trunk and stroke his enormous tusks. Huzzah - we'd only been in Sri Lanka for a few hours and I'd already ticked off my main aim for the holiday! What an over-achiever I am.

From Gangaramaya it's only a short walk to Seema Malaka, a small, modern temple designed by the renowned Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. (This is where we'd actually wanted to go first, but after a fruitless fifteen minutes our tuktuk driver gave up pretending to know what we were after and dumped us at Gangaramaya instead.) According to a story you can't help but relish, Seema Malaka's construction was funded by a local Muslim as an act of revenge on the Islamic community he'd fallen out with.  The temple consists of three linked wooden platforms rising out of Beira Lake, each structure topped with beautiful blue tiles. It's all very elegant and serene, but unfortunately our enjoyment of it was somewhat sullied by a man who latched onto us outside the temple and insisted on accompanying us around, impervious to our repeated attempts to get rid of him. Annoyingly, this kind of thing is quite common in Colombo - having engaged you in conversation (invariably by asking where you're from), people wil try to be of "help" to you - whether by eagerly giving you information (which you either already knew or which they've simply made up) or by establishing themselves as your informal guide - in the expectation that you'll reimburse them for their "services". Having started out determinedly uncynical ("the vast majority of Sri Lankans who approach you will be perfectly honest, and simply keen to have a chat"; so sayeth the Rough Guide), we've rapidly become hardened - we haven't been approached by a single, solitary person who was "simply keen to have a chat". We still haven't come up with a foolproof tactic for shaking them off - the most successful one so far was inadvertantly mentioning that we were staying in a guesthouse in South Colombo, at which point our accoster gave us a disgusted look, mumbled, "cheap place", and wandered away.

Day 2 saw us visit yet another temple, this time a Hindu one (roughly 17% of the population is Hindu), but unlike the Buddhist temples it seemed to be the exclusive domain of the devout, so we didn't venture inside. Instead we headed to the Pettah, a Tamil and Muslim bazaar district in the northeast of the city, which the guidebook describes as a captivating area characterised by shops crammed with colourful fabrics, women in beautiful saris, heavily laden barrow boys, and Muslim children dressed in white from head to toe. It uses the word "quaint" at least once. I can't, off the top of my head, think of when I've felt more misled by a guidebook. The Pettah is pretty much entirely devoid of romance - filthy, crammed with stalls selling tatty electronics, and bristling with cars, vans and tuktuks trying to jostle through the crowd (which, I might add, looks pretty much identical to crowds elsewhere in Colombo, with not a white-clad child in sight). To top it all off, we acquired a hassler who refused to be put off by Mike's claim that we didn't speak English (not surprisingly, really; that particular pretence is a bit tricky to keep up unless you eschew all communication with one another), and then called us liars when we said we didn't need any help. I was starting to look forward to seeing the back of Colombo.

We left the next morning on the 10:30 train, which the owners of our guesthouse (who, by the way, were lovely, and almost certainly in no way related to Pestering Pettah Man) advised us to arrive at least an hour early for - having seen the snaking queues at the ticket desk the day before, I could understand why. Mercifully, though, the desk was empty, so we had plenty of time to twiddle our thumbs waiting for the train. Sri Lankan trains are a fairly ancient breed, shunning any form of superfluous smartening up or decoration (which is to say, any), but the journey was pretty confortable really - lack of glass in the windows proves a handy substitute for air con (that reminds me of my dad's old Saab, which he used to claim had air con - closer inspection revealed that he was referring to the fact that one of the windows didn't close), and proceedings are livened up considerably by the incescant parade of food vendors through the carriages.

Galle, our destination, is Sri Lanka's fourth largest city, but after Colombo it feels like a particularly somnolent village - or at least, it does if you confine yourself to the walled old town ("Fort"), which we more or less do. Galle is apparently thought to have been the Biblical town of Tarshish, source of King Solomon's gold, peacocks and spices, but more recently it was colonised by the Portuguese and later the Dutch, and it's the Dutch influence which is still very much in evidence: tranquil streets are lined with Dutch colonial villas, and there's a sprinkling of Dutch churches for good measure. It's a lovely, atmospheric place to wander around, although the one drawback of its obvious attractions is that it's much more touristy than Colombo - whereas in the capital we never caught so much as a glimpse of another Westerner in any of the restaurants we tried, here our fellow diners are exclusively visitors, and the prices have been hiked up accordingly.

Speaking of food, on our first night here we ask our guesthouse owner whether they offer dinner, and we're treated to the most sumptuous spread I've seen in a very long time - at least ten separate dishes, ranging from curried pineapple to shredded jackfruit, and each more delicious than the last. It's essentially a lavish take on "rice and curry", a Sri Lankan staple which encompasses anything from miscellaneous dollops of curry atop a mound of clumpy rice to an all-singing all-dancing multi-dish spread. As a mark of dinner's stupendous tastiness, I ask our hostess to teach me the word for "delicious". This brings my Sinhala vocabulary up to three words, and considering that one of them is "pineapple" it probably isn't as general purpose as it could be.

The following day is spent wandering round Fort some more, being adopted by a local dog, and catching some of an enthusiastically supported cricket match. (Do cricket audiences cheer in Britain? Even if they do, I bet they don't play dance music between overs.) Today our meander along the South coast continues, subject to us being able to decode the mysteries of Sri Lankan bus schedules. See you soon!

Anyway! Cast your minds back, if you will, to Thursday the 28th of January. A London conference thrashed out the question of Afghanistan's future, David Cameron did some more back-pedalling on Section 28, and a chihuahua named Tinkerbell adopted three newborn kittens. Ah, those were the days. Meanwhile Mike and I set off for the outer Great Barrier Reef aboard the fair ship SilverSonic. There are a handful of operators offering trips out to the reef from Port Douglas, all of which sound much of a muchness - we chose based on who made the fewest punctuation errors in their leaflet. (Well, I say "we" - no prizes for guessing which of us felt there was bound to be a direct correlation between accurate comma usage and water sports safety record.) In a fit of overweening confidence I suggested that as well as snorkelling around the reef we also sign ourselves up for a scuba diving session - Mike had actually been diving once before, in a confined space filled with sharks, no less, whereas the most I'd ever done was hold my breath in the bath, and even then not for very long. Slightly worryingly, the first thing we were asked to do after stepping on board was to sign away all rights to litigation or compensation in the event of our watery deaths, after which we were shown a cheery video explaining the myriad ways in which we could kill or maim ourselves. By the time our instructor called our group of four over to get kitted out I was making silent whimpering sounds to myself and wondering whether I'd ever got round to signing the organ donor register.

My impending anxiety attack was all for nothing though - scuba diving was, somewhat improbably, a complete breeze. In fact, the trickiest part by far was attempting to waddle the three steps to the water's edge while strapped to several times my own body weight in equipment. We didn't get that much time on the ocean floor as we had to devote most of the session to safety procedures, and then descend very, very s-l-o-w-l-y, but it was good fun, once you'd shaken off that nagging sensation that death was imminent.  As an added bonus, we looked incredibly fetching throughout:

Note how the lycra sting-suit reveals the previously unsuspected bizareness of Mike's head shape. My black suit was a bit of a rarity - just about everyone else was resplendent in what were essentially skin-tight smurf costumes.

Our boat stopped at three different spots along the reef - having dived at the first, we snorkelled at the next two, which in fact brought you up much more close and personal to the fish and corals. We'd rented an underwater digital camera, on the assumption that lack of said camera was all that was standing between us and stunning coffee book-worthy photos. Unfortunately it turns out that it's next to impossible to see through a viewfinder underwater, so I succeeded only in taking 273 rather hazy pictures, most of which were attempts to capture a parrot fish. There are a few good ones in there, but it's going to take a while to sort them out, so for now I'll leave you with a slightly fuzzy but amazingly fluorescent clam - at least, I think it's a clam; please feel free to correct me!

That's all for now folks - we're off to Sri Lanka at an ungodly hour tomorrow (guess what I'm procrastinating from by writing this now?), and we'll be back here when we can, but I'm guessing our internet access will be a bit sporadic. Passe hamu wemu! (Which could mean, "please may I have another of your fine chicken sandwiches?", for all I know - I should probably make better acquaintance of the phrase book.)

P.S. A few sliiight amendments to Mike's last post:

"Roybert, or Royer or Rayman or something" = Roman

"Brendon" = Brandon

"Norbert the Wonder Parrot" = Bozo. Admittedly Norbert seems an almost sensible name for a cockatoo by comparison.

ps. this post will be quite text heavy, as although H kindly didn't point the finger about the missing camera cable, it was, believe it or not, me who packed it in the wrong bag.

The plane got in as the sun was setting, and it felt damp. I knew Cairns was in the tropics but I hadn't really put much thought to the humidity levels, at least we had a few steps up from a tent in the desert to look forward to, complete with air-con, mmm air-con, love it, I would choose air-con over the environment any day.

Port Douglas is about a 45 minute drive north of Cairns which we did by bus, it is meant to be a spectacular drive up the coast but as it was pitch darkness we couldn't tell. On arrival at TreeTop Resort, a kind of open air hotel based around a small landscaped rainforest, we headed straight for our room. Loveley, nice big room with all the mod cons, and we could watch some of the tennis. Come on Murray!

Sleep time.

24th Jan

Now I will be jumping through the next couple of days pretty swiftly, firslty because my brain does not seem to be connected to my fingers correctly today, and also because we did sweet F' all. We had our reasons though, cyclone Olga was on its way. We had seen warnings on the news at Ayres rock of the possibility of it hitting Port Douglas. This meant that most things in town were closed, and if they were not closed they were closing at 3pm, bugger. We had intented on visiting the sunday markets but ended up just wandering around. It is a lovely little place though, with a beautifull, small wooden church overlooking the sea that looks like it belongs in the Caribean. Back at our room we had the warning letter pushed under our door saying to stay inside, exiciting stuff, I wondered if it would be like Twister. It rained a bit, then it rained some more, and that was cyclone Olga. It passed right by. Ah well, we will get more stuff done tommorow we thought.

25th Jan

Wrong. We remained in the resort for pretty much the whole of the day, and it was great. I love doing nothing, and I especially love leaving your room to do nothing and coming back and it is all clean and the bed is made. I read, gymed a bit, had a swim and read some more. In the evening we thought we should eat somewhere other than the TreeTops restaurant so got the shuttle bus to another hotel which was meant to have a good fish eatery. The good fish restaurant was closed so we ate at the one handily opposite and opted to eat outside, but under cover in case it rained. And boy did it rain, bloody hell, I havn't seen that much rain before, we could hardly hear ourselves speak over the sound of it hitting the tent cover thingy. At least we didn't have to walk back in it, ah shit, yes we did.

We waited about an hour in the lobby watching some tennis until the rain had eased off a bit and then walked back along the road. H had an unbrella because she is a girl and more organised about these types of things. I got soaked, but it was like having a warm shower with your clothes on.

Oh yea, happy burns night. Me getting soaked was my shout out to it.

26th Jan

Australia day!  A bus driver from one of the days past recommended we head for a place called The Combi Club on the sea front. The place looked like it had evolved over a long period of time; the main building was made out of corregated iron, but then the massive veranda bit over the waterfront looking pretty modern. It was kitted out like a village fate, and events like tug of war and "hit the tinny" were going on. Came second in the tug of war, how many teams competed you say? Well that doesn't really matter does it, its the taking part that counts. The tug of war took place out on some tarmac, and it is pretty hard in flip-flops (which are amusingly called thongs here, it is strange hearing mums entering their kids into the "throw the thong" competition) and I mashed my foot up when my sandal thing came off, but I'm hard so I shrugged the excessive pain off easily. So what is Hit the Tinny? Basically you go down to the pontoon with a golf club and a ball and have to try and get the ball in or near  a little dingy that is moored about 150m out. I skimmed mine like a stone, which I thought was pretty impressive. Other people showed off by getting their balls in the boat. After some lunch we had a change of venue and we witnessed a pie eating competition which I had to drag H away from entering kicking and screaming. That was Australia day, everyone said it was a bit dead because of the cyclone warning causing some people to leave town, but fun none the less.

Oh somewhere in there we had a wander down the four mile beach, my first beach lined with palm trees and covered in fallen coconuts. The weather always looked like a storm was brewing  but it didn't rain today until the evening when the heavens opened. 

27th Jan

Congratulations if you are still reading. To intise you; today in my opinion was the best day of the trip so far. We had booked a tour called Daintree Dreaming. It was royally pissing it down when we woke up (if you havn't guessed already it is the wet season here). We fuelled up on bacon,eggs, sausages, beans and all that healthy stuff and went outside to wait for our pick up. Oh, I forgot to mention before that there is a tame Cockatoo by the reception called, mm can't remember its name, lets call it Norbet the Wonder Parrot for the sake of argument. I have been trying to give Norbet a stroke since we came but he/she just trys to bite me, but this morning she bowed her head like a Hippogriff and I scratched him/her behind the neck. This was truly a sign that things were looking up for today.

A four-by-four pulled up and our guide for the day Emma came bouncing up. Already in the car, were an Australian AFL player called Hayden and a German called, Roybert, or Royer or Rayman or something. If I refer to him again he will be "R". They had already driven up from Cairns but we just had a 15 minute drive to our first port of call; a Daintree River boat trip. I jammed a couple of those all in one, attractive rain sacks into my pocket and we headed on to the boat. After about 5 minutes we spied a 3m long tree snake, closely followed by the worlds largest tree frog, and then a crocodile! Although I could not tell which bit I was looking at as it was only little and hidden away through the bushes, but I aimed the camera and pressed the button. The photo wasn't half bad.

The boat trip was about half an hour and we shared it with another larger tour group, but left them early to persue other adventurous activities. Now I'm not really a fan of guided tours usually, but this one was ace. Next on our list we headed into the rainforest and walked through rivers (I have already retired my shoes) and through crazy ferns to reach a spectaular 30m ish high water fall called Neo falls, which was particularly big today because of the heavy rains. We all stripped off to our swimmers (up on the lingo now) and scrambled over the rocks and into the beautiful pool at the base of the fall. The water fall is surrounded by dense foliage, and it really felt as though we had discovered it. There were natural spas formed near the base of the waterfall, and following Hayden's lead four of us (Emma, the guide kindly held back to take a photo) bellyflopped our way like seals up the slippery rocks to get a photo right under the fall. Awesome. We swam back to our clothes, but didn't really bother putting them back on and walked back trough the forest to the car.

Lunch was then put on for us at a small ramshackle type cafe. After we had our fill it was off to meet Brendon the Aboriginal hunter for a spot of spear fishing. Unlike the Aborignals we met in central Australia Brendon spoke fluent english, and obviously had kept in touch with his roots but was to all intensive purposes was a normal guy (I know this sounds racist and patronising but I cant think of a better way to say it. You know, he was westernised although he is not in the west). We were each handed a long thin bamboo spear when on the beach and shown how to throw it. Brendon flung his far into the distance where it stuck perfectly into the ground. I threw mine a couple of metres scaring a fallen coconut. We started off walking along the beach. The water was very shallow and you could walk along the sand planes for miles with the water only being inches deep and very warm. The sand had become grey mud now and in the distance Brendon pointed out a grey mass on the mud slowly moving, on closer inspection the mass turned out to be hundreds of little crabs scuttling across the sand. It was like being in a helicopter looking down on a heard of bison. As soon as you approached the crabs all of them dissapeared into little self-dug holes in a couple of seconds.

We were warned of stinging jelly fish as at this point we were up to our knees spears at the ready but we only saw the harmless ones. A couple of sting ray shaped holes in the mud were where sting rays had once been and slightly bigger blue clawed crabs were scuttling by. All the time we were picking up winkles and shellfish to cook later but the real goal was to catch a big mud crab. Branden led us away from the mudbanks and into the mangroves of the surrounding jungle. The mangroves all stood high on cages of roots and the grey mud under your feet was like a free spa treatment. It transpired that crocodiles don't like coming in hear because they are lazy and sharks don't either because they can't swim backwards so would get stuck and drown when the tide went out. Everyone was bear foot because the mud would suck your shoes off and we were now on the lookout for mussles.

As we got deeping in to the mangroves I kept getting handed big clam looking mussels from H and Hayden and R. I found one mussel, they were just sitting on the mud not attached to anything. you gave them a sharp tap on a root to make sure they were alive and then bucketed them. Occasionally there would be a small pile of opened mussels around a tree root, this is where the mud crab had been feeding.

It started to rain again, now we  were all suitably wet and muddy, and it felt if we didn't find a mud crab we would be going hungry. 20 minutes of mussel gathering later Brendon had his spear in the muddy water jabbing it in and out, after about 5 minutes he  unearthed a big mud crab. Score! It turned out that in the fight the crab had bitten off its two front claws that were huge in attempt to escape, it would usually grow these back in a few days. Brendon dug up the claws aswell and we headed out of the mangroves back on to the mud banks. At this point, determined to spear a fish Brendon waded deep out into the water. We followed to an extent and then contented ourselved with just having a wander and I experimented with my spear throwing technique. Hayden speared a small crab, and after seeing it squirm its last on the end of the spear, I decided not to aim for anything anymore, although from my non-existant catch aiming wasn't my forte anyway.

On the way back Brendon picked up some oval pinkish type fruits from under a tree and we followed him back to his house past the Drunken Parrot tree (parrots eat the seeds, get drunk and then fall out of the tree, all the names of things were really literal, like the Snottlegrobber, which was a small fish covered in snot type stuff and made the noise "grob grob").

I forgot about my "thou should not kill" attitude when Brendon's wife bought out our catch all cooked and looking delcious. We ate the mussels with some lime and Brendon's 8 year old homemade chili sauce ("The Ring Burner" written on the lable) and ate the delicious mud crab as it was. The pinkish fruits turned out to be a type of passion fruit and tasted better than any passion fruit I had ever eaten. 

As if all this lovely sea food wasn't enough his wife had made a big tray of Damper, a kind of bread made with butter and flour. It was like slices of warm scones and I must have had about 7 with more butter spread on top and a healthy portion of syrup.

Brendon showed us some of his turtle shells from the turtles he had caught and eaten, and told us of how you have to remove the gallbladder without bursting it before killing the turtle otherwise the meat will kill you. Then a huge array of shells, sting ray barbs and swordfish parts were shown including a little cone shell that looked like a chocolate cornetto. It turns out that if you pick this cone one up a barb will shoot out the back of it into you and you will have about 20 minutes to say your goodbyes. It is becoming apparent that if a venemous animal can kill you then it will come from Australia.

We packed up and got dropped off back at the resort. All in all an awesome day. If you are ever in this area I can highly recommend "Daintree Dreaming" ran by a group called Adventure North.

Tommorow we have some snorkeling and an introductory scuba dive booked at the Great Barrier Reef. Sounds pretty immense but today will take some beating. 

Well, you didn't think we were going to go to Australia for a month without seeing Uluru, did you?

The beadier-eyed among you might be thinking that this looks suspiciously good for a photo taken by us, and you'd be on to something - we did take pictures (some of them are even good, honest), but in our infinite wisdom we managed to pack the camera USB cable in a bag which is now locked away somewhere in the bowels of Sydney airport, so unless we can find a computer with a memory card slot you'll have to use your imaginations to fill in the visual gaps for now. (If you're struggling, think lots of red sand.)

21st January

Our original plan was to fly to Alice Springs, famous as a gateway to Uluru (or Ayers Rock, depending on how right-on your geography teachers were - its official name is in fact "Uluru/Ayers Rock" which manages to be both cumbersome and pusillanimously non-committal), and use the town as a base for exploring the area. This was based on the - as it turned out - staggeringly inaccurate assumption that Alice Springs was about an hour's drive from Uluru. Multiply that by five or six and you're closer to the actual journey time - they're a whopping 280 miles apart (or 450 km, for you futuristic metric people). Suddenly the flying 48 hour trip we'd had in mind didn't seem quite so do-able.

Luckily, though, it turns out that there's an airport right by Uluru itself, and you can fly direct from Sydney (without having to show a shred of identification, I might add, although I was "randomly" selected for an explosives search on both the incoming and outgoing flight, and even set the blasted thing off the second time. Apparently suncream can trigger it - this seems to me a bit of a flaw in a security system designed for use in Australia). I don't know whether the plane's flying unusually low or whether there's simply no cloud cover, but we're treated to sweeping views for the entire flight - Australia's so-called Red Centre really does say it all in the name: vast expanses of red earth punctuated only by a few salt lakes, which look more like white sand from the air. Apparently there are also over a million dromedaries roaming wild in this area (they were introduced as exploration aids back in the 1840s), but my current prescription isn't quite up to spotting any.   

Ayers Rock airport is tiny - when we come in to land, the plane first touches down on nothing more than a sandy expanse, which only later gives way to an actual runway (the airport has the same number of runways as Gatwick; now there's food for thought). Helpfully, a free shuttle service meets every flight and takes passengers to Ayers Rock Resort - and if you've flown in here, that's where you're staying. The resort comprises a handful of hotels, a campsite and a "town centre" which is home to a few souveneir shops, a supermarket and a restaurant. Being completely self-contained, it's a slightly surreal place - apparently the combination of the remoteness and the chlaustrophobia means that the average staff member lasts only three months. Staying here isn't cheap - which is fair enough when you consider that it's in the middle of nowhere and everything has to be trucked in - so we decide to keep costs down as much as possible by staying on the campsite. They have a few permanent canvas tents you can rent, complete with laminate flooring and proper beds; we luck out and are assigned a four bed tent, meaning we have space to swing even a large, uncooperative cat. I imagine these tents would be great in the cooler months (hot water bottles and extra blankets are provided, just in case), but, interestingly, in 43° heat they become indistinguishable from saunas. In fact, it's actually cooler outside than in, so as soon as we've dumped our bags we beat a quick retreat to the swimming pool.

After a late and particularly unpleasant lunch (though it could probably have been worse - I don't imagine much good can come of serving sushi 1,000 miles from the sea) we book ourselves into an astronomy session at the local observatory. This is supposedly one of the best spots in the world to see the night sky, and our astronomer guide, Trevor, is that fantastic combination of incredibly knowledgeable and contageously enthusiastic. Armed with a handy laser pointer (which can apparently interfere with planes, so don't try this at home, kids) he teaches us several ways to find due South, shows us all sorts of Southern hemisphere constellations (as well as the occasional upside-down Northern one) and the odd planet, and then sets up several telescopes so we can see everything from the surface to the moon to a cluster of newly born stars.

22nd January

By Friday we've mastered the art of dealing with the heat: hang out in fancy hotels. Judging by the number of suspiciously familiar-looking people we spy sprawled, asleep, over lobby sofas with backpacks at their feet, this isn't an entirely original strategy. I try kangaroo for lunch, which is actually reasonably tasty, and then it's off for the afternoon's activities: a dot painting workshop followed by the star attraction, Uluru itself. Dot painting is the aboriginal style of decoration you see adorning everything from didgeridoos to mousemats, though we're surprised to learn that it only emerged in the 1970s. Our teacher is a local Anangu woman named Happy, whose parents seem to have named her before taking time to assess her personality. Studiously avoiding eye contact she draws a few shapes in the sand for us, while our interpreter provides a somewhat patchy explanation of the concepts behind dot painting, and we're then let loose on the paints and canvases and left to our own devices.

There are very few universal symbols in dot painting (though you can see a few common ones here) - each piece serves to convey a story, and the chances are you'll need to be told that story in order to fully make sense of the visual represeantations. The story elements are meant to be painted first, as they're the most important part of the picture, and the background dots are added afterwards - we're provided with bottles of paint with nozzle applicators specifically for the purpose, but I try the traditional way of making dots, which is to use the end of a stick (well, in this case a cocktail stick, but that doesn't have quite the same aura of authenticity), dipped in paint. This may explain why I'm the only person not to finish their painting.

After the workshop Happy, who seems to have opened up a bit, leads us on a walk around part of Uluru's base, taking us to caves and a water hole while explaining the Dreamtime legend of the serpent woman, which is interwoven with these parts of the rock. She points out what Aboriginals consider to be the evidence backing up the stories - physical traces which 'prove' that they really happened, such as trails of 'blood' left on the rock by a wounded warrior snake, or the mark of a wriggling serpent winding its way around the stone. She also shows us how various bush foods would be gathered and prepared (the area immediately surrounding Uluru is surprisingly lush, with plenty of plant life), though when asked if she still eats them today she smiles and tells us that she likes Wheetabix.

Finally, we're driven out away from Uluru to a viewpoint from which to see the sunset. Watching the sun rise or set over Uluru is always billed as a "must do", but to be honest we're both a bit underwhelmed. I think it's because - to my surprise - you're not actually watching the sun set behind the rock, so forget pictures of Uluru silhouetted against a stunning sky. No, what you're supposed to be bowled over by is the changing colour of the rock as the sun sets off to one side, but I can't say either of us really notices this. I mean yes, it  changes colour in that it gets darker, but then so does everything around it; that's what generally happens when the sun recedes. Still, it's a great spot for that picture postcard view, and the bus driver tells us in fascinating detail about how Uluru was formed (to cut a very long story short, just in case you too were wondering how a gigantic monolith came to be in the middle of a desert, it's a sandstone formation which built up when the area was underwater, and has become tipped 90° to one side so that the layers now run top to bottom. One end of the rock is estimated to be 50 million years younger than the other).

23rd January

I'd never heard of Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas) before coming here, but they're a series of domes which share a national park with Uluru, and their highest peak is in fact taller than Uluru's. We're up at the ungodly hour of 4:40 (which actually isn't all that bad if you've made it into bed by half past nine for the first time since you were ten) to get there in time to see the sun rise over them. Neither of us rates this much higher than Uluru's sunset, but there's another good reason for getting up so early - we're doing the 8km 'Valley of the Winds' walk through Kata Tjuta, and it's strongly advised to be finished before the heat of the day really kicks in - indeed, you're not even allowed on the walk after 11am. It's a really enjoyable amble (occasionally a scramble) with some wonderful views, and we even spot a mother and baby kangaroo at close quarters. I realise this is probably about as exciting to most Australians as seeing a pigeon, but that doesn't stop me from taking eleventy-nine photos.

After a slightly panicked dash to get to the airport (Australian bus drivers, while friendly, seem to think that unless you're jumping up and down while gesturing wildly with your arms you can't really want to get on the bus) we're all set for the next leg of our journey, which takes to Port Douglas, a plan which is based entirely on a vague memory I have of liking the sound of it when reading a travel brochure aged about 15. What can possibly go wrong?

Twas the evening of the Monday and I had my Avatar tickets booked at the Imax, the one with largest screen in the world don't-you-know. The screen was pretty massive, although when the film started playing there was a good metre margin of unused screen all around, what a con. Anyhow the film: anyone seen a slightly crap, early 90s cartoon called Fern Gully? Well, James Cameron, in his wisdom, thought he would remake it but throw excessive amounts of cash at the development. The result being a spectacularly attractive film but unrelentlessly shit otherwise. After you have pieced together exactly what is going to happen after the first frame, even the array of impossible plants and creatures hold your attention only for a couple of nano-seconds:

"But Mr Cameron sir, I don't think this horse thing needs an extra pair of legs, it wouldn't be able to run very well." 

"WHAT DID YOU SAY!? People will marvel at my creative genius."

"I'm sorry sir, I forgot about your ability to attract hundreds of millions in funding, look I have given it gills to breath through, isn't that novel?"

So that was Avatar.

Back to Australia, it is now Tuesday morning and we have rented a car, a red one, with air-conditioning thank god. Our plan; to drive down to the Blue Mountains to the Jenolan Caves, which from the descriptions and photos in the guide book look pretty epic. The car is an automatic, the first automatic I have driven. After a couple of phantom gear shifts and circuits of the car park we are off. A couple of turns and we are on a road that we continue to be on for the next 2 hours. A motorway is a motorway, except there is a lot more of that blue sky stuff that I had forgotten about, but after about two hours we take a left on to the Jenolan Caves Road and the countryside immediately opens out to revel vast Tuscany-esque rolling hills. With my sharp eye, I quickly spot a mob (thanks Wikipedia) of emus, which, to Heather's delight, turn out to be cows. The road is now thinner, windier, and snaking through mountainous scenery. After an hour or so a massive cave mouth appears over a lake, with the road going through the cave. It felt wrong, like driving off a cliff edge because a sign told us to, but we did, and it was cool. Emerging out the other side we go through a small touristy bit consisting of a ticket office, some toilets and a hotel/cafe. We park the car and have a quick picnic as it is now lunchtime.

In the ticket office we elect to visit the cave called The Temple of Baal as it is the ticket man's favourite, and the most popular cave (The Lucas Cave) seems to be the most popular because it is very big but doesn't have all the nice pretty formations that The Temple of Baal offers. The Jenolan caves consist of multiple caves of all sizes and shapes but there are 10 show caves that have been fitted out with lighting and safe pathways. Our tour of The Temple of Baal starts in an hour so we have a walk through the self-guided Nettle Cave first. We go up some steep steps and into the Devil's Coach House, the name of a huge cave with a massive opening one side.

The Devil's Coach House

From here we climb some steep metal stairs and enter the Nettle Caves. If I was a caveman this is where I would make a cave city. The caves form a network of rooms decorated with huge stone columns. Because of the massive opening at the Devil's Coach house these caves are lit by daylight. My audio guide is broken so I resort to making up facts about the caves whilst H fills me in on the gaps, but spares me the parts about what I can't eat whilst in the cave. Time for our tour of The Temple of Baal. Our tour guide, whose name I can't remember, reminded me strongly of Murray from Flight of the Conchords, and was very entertaining. We are led through a long underground man-blasted tunnel, and down some dark metal steps in to the first cavern. It is very dark here, and the guide switches on some lights so we can see around. It is pretty small this area, and more people than the 16 we are would have struggled to fit in. As different lights are switched on, new areas of sparkling crystal formations are revealed, some look like macaroni and others like bedsheets.  Over at one side a stalagmite that resembles a bottle is pointed out, and it transpires that this bottle was left under a drip of water to fill up for when the guy fitting the stairs wanted a drink. 50-odd years later and it is covered in crystal.

Crystallised bottle. (The pale thing right of centre.)

 We are led into a bigger cavern and then into an even bigger cavern, but the size is unknown to us at first as the tour guide teases us by switching on lights for specific areas at a time, and then finally puts them all on revealing that where I thought the ceiling was was inaccurate by about 40 metres. The cave formations are surrounded by a web of myths; we see the "Golden Fleece" and a huge angle like crystal statue in front of an "alter".

Crystal formation resembling a cloaked figure.

The cave takes its name from the biblical story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and at the end of the tour we watch the cave come to life being lit up to music and see Baal himself. (Heather edit: "Baal" being a formation which looks like a squat old man with a beard, just in case you were wondering whether Mike was having a religious experience.) Ooo I forgot a bit, the bit where the guide turned all the lights off to show that no daylight got into the cave whatsoever. When waving your hand in front of your face you begin to hallucinate that you can see the outline of your hand. It is pretty incredible thinking that these caves were discovered by candlelight.

The drive back takes a little longer as we loop back a bit to find a particular road sign to photograph. About half 8 in the evening we arrive back into Sydney suitably knackered, grab some food and crash.

What tourists we are.

Wednesday 20th

H heads out to explore the Sydney fish market, coming back with tails of massive lobsters and weird prehistoric looking bugs. (Heather: Moreton Bay Bugs - check 'em out!) I do some of that rubbish work stuff . Today's main attraction, however, is surfing! We left it too late to book a lesson, but instead thought we would hop on the ferry over to Manly beach and rent a board. We did this with remarkable ease and at only $10 an hour thought it was pretty good value. We picked our spot and I looked around to see how people put their surf boards down so I wouldn't look too much like a noob, and put mine down and sat on it, watching people surfing to see how it was done. The previous night we swotted up on technique with YouTube videos ( I have carpet burns on my knees), so now had a sprinkling of know-how. I strapped the board to my ankle and wandered towards the water. A megaphone sounded, and while I was expecting it to say something like: "will the ginger albino man please not attempt to surf", it warned of currents in the area I was going into, so I relocated and tried again. The water was a lovely temperature.

Amateur.

"Wave, I need a wave," I thought. I belly flopped onto the board and began mimicking those around me to the best of my ability.  A wave that a toddler stood through rolled me and I got tangled in the board cord and momentarily thought I had died. Second attempt I made it out further, turned to face the shore and a wave picked me up and carried me all the way back to the start, amazing, but I was still only on my stomach, I forgot about the standing up bit. After a couple of drownings and belly surfs it was H's turn to have a crack. I had drifted about 100m horizontally without noticing and was now in the strong current area so had a bit of a walk back to our camp. The waves didn't seem to vex H so much, maybe because she is more streamlined; about 20 minutes of putting me to shame later she returned. 

Pro.

We warmed up and dried off and H went to get some frozen yogurt but failed. Right, time to have another crack: it was harder going in the second time as I knew the pain was awaiting, but H had made a friend, a really nice surfing Dad friend, whose son was by far the most impressive surfer in the sea that day. He gave some useful pointers, and I could now paddle through a wave without getting rolled. After about 20 mins of failed surfing attempts I turned around and saw Mr Friendly Man swimming out to me. He took me right out to the good waves and I got a private lesson and, believe it or not, managed to surf for about 4 seconds, standing on my feet and everything, awesome. Time to quit whilst I was ahead.

Really friendly guy who I got a free lesson from. Notice the subtle difference in skin tone.

Action Shot. That little boy in the background actually has really long legs, it is in fact many fathoms deep.

Back at Circular Quay I headed off to book a restaurant for the evening and H went back to the flat to shower and get ready to take sunset photographs of the harbour. Whilst I freshened up H went into the Botanical Gardens (great views of the harbour) and took some pretty amazing shots, including one of a Possum that stumbled into her path.

POSSUM! That red slit on its tummy is its pouch, we think.

We met at the restaurant within the Sydney Opera House and treated ourselves to a fancy meal with amazing views for our last night in Sydney.

(Heather edit: Erm...this isn't actually the view from the Opera House restaurant, as you may have guessed from the fact that the Opera House is in the picture.)

Bye bye Sydney.

17th January

Mike takes the concept of Sunday as a day of rest literally (he embraces Christianity selectively), so it's coming on for lunchtime by the time we're out and about. First port of call is - you guessed it - the Rocks market! If future generations have to one day reconstruct Sydney based solely on this blog, they'll conclude that the city consisted entirely of the Rocks, which hosted a never-ending market. Sadly our attempts at buying souvenirs prove spectacularly unsuccessful, so we wander homewards via the Opera House, which we duck inside to take a look at the parts open to non-ticket-buying scum such as ourselves. It's eerily empty and unexpectedly futuristic, though maybe we shouldn't have been surprised given that the outside looks like a cross between a space ship and Sonic the Hedgehog.

A sample corridor - this one leads to a lift without a ceiling, which makes for a slightly disorientating ride. Should you happen to jump up above the level of the walls, an alarm goes off. Don't ask how we know this.

18th January

I have a confession to make: when I found out we were going to Sydney, my first excited thought wasn't of the Opera House, or Harbour Bridge, or even of Bondi Beach. Nope, it was - verbatim - "oohh ooh ooohh, we can go to bills!". Bill Granger, in case you haven't heard of him, is Australia's foremost celebrity cook, and his eponymous cafés are a Sydney institution. They've exerted a fascination for me ever since I bought his first book, Sydney Food, which exudes a sense of airiness and ease of living - the feeling of being in a city where you can leisurely stroll to the fish market to pick up some dazzlingly fresh clams in the morning, duck back into the urban bustle to grab a quick lunch, then spend the afternoon unhurriedly putting together dishes for a relaxed meal with friends in the evening sun. (My interpretation of Sydney Food is untarnished by inconvenient things like jobs, no matter what Bill may write about "after work nibbles".) Every now and then Mike and I draw up lists of what we still want to get done in Sydney, and while his include things like "visit zoo" and "climb bridge", mine basically consist of restaurant names. (Let's not think too hard about what this says about me as a person.) I'd already persuaded him that Billy Kwong, Marigold Citymark, Chat Thai, Sushi Tei and Sydney Madang were essential cultural experiences (don't worry, we're saving money in other areas - Mike hasn't been to any museums), and today bills finally got its turn. Well...I may have dropped in last week for a particularly delicious soy cappuccino - have I ever mentioned that Sydneysiders do coffee so much better than we do? - but that was entirely necessary preliminary research. Anyway. We went to the original branch, which despite having a fairly unprepossessing external appearance opens up, Tardis-like, once you're inside, and feasted on toasted coconut bread and sweetcorn fritters, the recipes for both of which are, as it happens, in Sydney Food. I'd actually made the fritters before, but mine weren't nearly as nice - I think I probably committed an unpardonable sin by using frozen sweetcorn.

...and when I start writing about sweetcorn you know I'm really scraping the barrel. I wonder if Stephen Fry ever twitters about vegetables?

In the afternoon, Mike claims he has to work, which I suspect is an elaborate avoidance tactic to get out of coming shopping. After trudging around town for three and a half hours I discover that a) the majority of quirky boutique shops appear to be shut on Mondays (a subject on which the guidebook was mysteriously silent), and b) the few that are open sell stuff you can buy in Paperchase. For the first time I develop an opinion on the global marketplace.

Things look up in the evening though, when we (Mike having been lured out by the prospect of food) wander into Kinokuniya, a book shop in one of our local shopping centres. The website may look like the online store of a potentially dodgy eBay seller, but don't let that put you off - Kinokuniya's fantastic. Shelf upon shelf of travel guides, reams of cookbooks (an entire bookcase and a half is dedicated to cakes), and what looks to be a truly fabulous visual arts section, if you're that way inclined (I'm quite taken with the wall of dress-up paper dolls, myself). Unfortunately it was already coming up to closing time when we arrived - my wallet breathed an audible sigh of relief. Little does it know that I'm planning to go back tomorrow...

Right, should really get some washing done, my only two pairs of shorts are now well and truly soiled, not in bad way but they don't smell all that great. After jamming all the dirty stuff into a small carrier bag I grabbed a handful of change (notice the subtle change of tense) and got the lift down to the "M" floor. Just like being back at Pollock Halls: a line of top-loading washing machines and some dryers, and I don't have the correct change. So I wouldn't have to ask for change whilst carrying a plastic bag full of my belongings, I filled one of the machines and then headed down to the Thai restaurant on the bottom floor to see if I could change my fiver for some 2 dollar coins. They had two two dollar coins; getting there. Went back up to the washers and used the coin to get a sachet of powder, set up the washing machine and put in the second two dollar coin; it wanted another. Back up to the flat to see if H had any, she didn't. Out on the street a nice business man sort of person gave me what I needed and I finally got the washer going. All this kerfuffle is why I tend not to do clothes washing all that often.

Whilst I was slaving away H was out a-wandering looking for some kind of craft shop for those gift things I don't bother myself with. It now being lunch time (the washing took bloody ages) I headed into Chinatown to meet up with her for some food: she had scoped out a dim-sun place that sounded half-decent. Having only been to Glasgow's Chinatown I was impressed that Sydney's consisted of more than one building and actually felt like a busy street in China. We headed into a shopping mall and up a lift into the dim-sum restaurant which was massive with rows and rows of round tables and full of Chinese people whizzing around with trolleys of dumplings etc. We sat down and very quickly had an array of grub sprawled in front of us. I accidentally chose a dessert first; these Chinese, I tell you.

After we had had our fill we decided on walking around Darling Harbour, tagged as being a tourist-haven and where the I-Max cinema and bowling and things like that are. With no false expectations we headed off. H had been here previously in the morning on her craft shop hunt, but she had decided to get to it by walking down a motorway. With me in charge of directions we walked on pavements. The place was a bit soulless but seems fun for kids, with lots of water things to play in and climbing frames to climb. After playing in the water things we passed the I-Max cinema, where I have already booked a ticket for Avatar in glorious 3D. H won't be joining me for this, the fact that it is the world's biggest screen and that Avatar will make up for having no story with epic effects and alien battles didn't seem to entice her; some people.

Darling Harbour

This is the closest Heather's come to swimming this holiday.

An ice cream later we found ourselves in a Mythical Creatures exhibition at the Maritime Museum, the best bit of which was undoubtedly the guy who was dressed as a gargoyle and who scared the crap out of some kids by shouting when they walked passed. I, being very manly, managed to cleverly turn my girlie scream into a laugh and directed it at the kids.

A mermaid, made by sewing together a monkey skeleton and a fish.

Me loving it.

A monorail snakes it away through Sydney and passes through Darling Harbour; our flat is only two stops away but we thought it would be cool to ride it so bought a couple of tokens and got on board. The monorail set off in the wrong direction. A nice aerial tour of Sydney later we arrived back at the flat where I probably fell asleep and H, mm, she probably painted her nails or something.

After our rejuvenation session we left for our now most-visited place in Sydney; The Rocks. It was now dark and the night market would be in full swing. We filled up on some tasty food and sat down in front of a gypsy funk band whilst we ate. After some browsing of the stalls and watching an immensely talented couple of guys on a guitar and a double bass we set off out of the market. RIght at the start, or end I guess, of the market was a pub/club belting out some live 60s-80's classics. What the hell, let's go have a drink and a dance, we thought. I asked the bouncer whether sandals were ok, and although offended by my footwear he seemed to think it odd that I asked, given the appearance of the place. It was a massive pub with a bar in the centre, a band at one end, and crammed full of punters including a hen party or two. A couple of drinks later we were showing the Aussies how dancing should be done, persevering (though in H's case with a scowl) even through songs like "Can't Take My Eyes Off You". Stepping out of the club I felt like I had been swimming with all my clothes on. Time to go home.

14th January

I awoke alone; H had deemed me too lazy and left on some excursion without me, probably gift hunting or something. I went back to sleep. We thought we would try to get to Bondi Beach today. Being a Saturday we knew it would be heaving with folk but at least this would give us a genuine feel for the place. Upon stepping outside, however, we decided it was too cool for the beach. I say "we" - it was probably still 24°C, but at this kind of low temperature Heather's blood is in danger of freezing. We instead set off to a place called Paddington Market. After a small rant at the crapness of the Sydney bus network we arrived and had a wander around the stalls. This was a bit too close to shopping for my liking, so we found a nice coffee shop and had a sit down.

Heather: Paddington's full of streets lined with these tiny terraced houses with their elaborate iron balustrades. Once heavily working class (in 1935 it was described as "the worst white slum in the British Empire"), Paddington is now achingly hip, and apparently many of these miniature houses have been converted into glass-backed, marble-bathroomed, open-plan living spaces.

I left without my wallet and a nice waiter ran up to me and gave it back. Having not really thought to book anything for dinner we were turned away from the first couple of places we tried because they were full, and had a 10 minute wait for a table before we finally ate something at a really nice pizza place. After the previous evening we decided to have a quiet night in with "Monkey Island: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood". Today was one of those constructive days.