Dossing in Oz‏

Greetings from a slightly overcast Cairns. For the uneducated among you (most of you as far as I can tell), I'm in Northern Queensland, which is in the North-East corner of Australia. For those of you who went to school in Kent, Australia is a big country, kind of to the South-East of Chatham.

Last time I wrote I was in lovely Koh Samui, which turned out to be the best place we went to in Asia. It was cheap, clean, sunny, had a lovely beach and was a generally relaxed place to be. It seemed to be full of Scandinavian girls too. As you can imagine, it was hell on Earth. If the place itself wasn't hell, the journey out certainly was. We went from the island of Koh Samui in Thailand to the island of Penang in Malaysia. To cut a very long story short, it took us 24 hours, 4 bus journeys, 2 ferries, a claustrophibic minibus from hell across the border, 5 hours on a station platform shared with a couple of diseased dogs, and an overnight train to an area that had recently been attacked by a separatist Islamic movemement. But apart from that it was fun.

We arrived in Georgetown, the capital of Penang to drive into the mother of all traffic jams. It's not often you turn a corner to find yourself facing four lanes of heavy traffic going in your direction. It made Boston in rush-hour look civilised. Speaking of civilised, I have this whole theory of how to measure the level of civilisation in a country. Pavements. It doesn't sound that convincing, but it's true. Bangkok had big pavements, but these usually had huge lights or foundations blocking them every few feet. In Koh Samui, there were really thin pavements that were lined with parked mopeds. At busy times you'd find yourself having to walk almost in the middle of the road. By the time we got to Penang's Chinatown where we were staying, the pavements had disappered completely. I can't tell you how much fun it is walking in the road with a huge rucksack on your back being buzzed by cars, bikes, mopeds, trucks, and my personal favourite; buses. There's nothing like being brushed by a bus as it speeds past you at 50 miles an hour. Who needs exreme sports?

Anyway, Penang was nice but a bit boring. We were expecting another beach resort but there were really only big posh individual resort hotels by the beaches, so we stayed in Georgetown which was an old colonial town with no beaches, but an old fort and some other colonial stuff. After that we went down to Melaka which was very similar with lots of old colonial buildings back to the time when it was a huge trading port back in the 17th and 18th centuries. After a couple of days there we got the bus down to Singapore. Although very close to each other, going from Malaysia to Singapore reminded me of going from Mexico to the US. Singapore is nice. It's big, it's modern, it much cleaner and efficient than anywhere else I've ever been to. It also meant that it was expensive, but we had another free hotel, so big up the Travel 2. Singapore by the way has HUGE pavements and a whole load of pedestrianised areas, just to show off how civilised they are. After a couple of days of shopping and eating, it was time for me and Dave to go our separate ways. Dave cried his little eyes out and begged me not to leave him, but I suppose that's to be expected.

Two flights later I finally arrived in Oz where it was raining, and had apparantly been raining for the past week. This is the tropics, so it doesn't just rain, it RAINS. It's nice at the moment though. I have sod all to say about the place so far as I've just here. Don't worry, as soon as I've been here a while I'll bore you to tears with how great it is, just like all the other gits who go off to somewhere nice and love nothing better that telling everyone else how fantastic it is just because they can't be there. It's my turn now and I can't pass up on the oppurtunity.