Sep 2006

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
- Vincent Van Gogh

Greetings fellow bloggers! Nadine and I are currently here in Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands after a day of travel. What better to do at the end of a day than update our blog.

After our brief stint in Singapore, we quickly ventured over the northern border to Malaysia. I didn't know what to expect with Malaysia, other than the fact that the country is Muslim. What is unique about Malaysia is that it is a country that is able to successfully, and more importantly, coexist with THREE major religions living in close proximity, Islam, Christianity, and the Hindu religions. The 3 religions respect each other and acknowledge the others right to exist. Uncommon in our current times. In addition to that, I would never consider Malaysia a third world country. It is clean, efficient, orderly, people are very helpful and polite. I would rate it as a second world country if anything else. The underlying fact is that I would recommend Malaysia to anyone, as long as you are ready for a little heat and humidity.

Our first stop of our visit in penisular Malaysia was Pulau Tioman. Pulau Tioman is an island off of the south western coast. After a ferry ride across bumpy waters, we set foot on ABC beach. Yes, in order to stay there, you must be able to say your ABC's. New Mexicans are automatically excluded from this beach. They are allowed on Green Chile beach.

Pulau Tioman gave us a chance to sit on a beach and watch the monkeys, monitor lizards, and bats play. We stayed there 3 nights. What made it interesting was that every morning, we would stick our heads out, and find monkeys running around the grounds of our little bungalow. Beside them would be monitor lizards of varying sizes slowly walking across the grass. At night, bats were flying by our heads eating all of the bothersome mosquitos flying around our legs. It was all fun and games until one afternoon. Before our departure for the island, we purchased a bag of fruit. By the time the second afternoon arrived, we had consumed all of the bananas, oranges, and apples. The lone fruit was a large mango that Nadine had her beautiful blue eyes on for a few days. This afternoon, we went and had some lunch with mango being our dessert. Walking back from lunch, we approached our bungalow to find everything just like we had found it, EXCEPT, the mango was missing from the plastic bag. A monkey came by and swiped our mango while we were gone. If you find a monkey with mango chunks around its mouth, know that they ate our mango and they owe us one.

In addition to interesting monkeys, Pulau Tioman introduced us to new drinks. We're adventerous in trying new foods and drinks. Malaysia hasn't proved to be any different. Walking along the sidewalk one day, also is the major thoroughway between all beaches, thus has scooters, trucks, and people sharing the same road, we came upon a stall with a large list of drinks that we had never heard of. We tried some soy milk (good), 100 Plus (a type of Sprite), but the most unique was Grass Jelly soda. It's a drink with regular soda infused with small capsules of foul tasting grass jelly. Whew that was nasty! Just the sensation of having several pieces of jelly sliding through your straw just doesn't work for me. It was like eating dozens of jelly fish at once. Don't let me put you off, try it at least once, then move over to the apple juice with aloe bits. That tastes a little better.

I also took the chance to run, and run off that darned grass jelly drink. It was the first time to run since the Cook Islands. Combine that with the intense humidity, you'll never find that in Odessa, and proved to be a challenging run.

Leaving Pulau Tioman, we headed up the eastern coast to Kuantan, a stop on our way up a little village called Chetaring. But in Kuantan, is where we had some great travel tales. Being in a place we weren't going to stay long enough to catch the next bus, we didn't think much of our time there. Jumping off the bus, we walked through stalls of food being served. This was an authentic experience. No tourists, no backpackers, just Malays and their food. We settled up to the table at one stall, fumbled through our guidebook looking for the correct phrases to say, "we want good food, won't make us sick, and no chicken feet." It worked, we had a great little lunch with a bunch of Malaysian ladies giggling at us as we ate.

Completing lunch, we walked to the spot where the public bus leaves for Chetaring. Along the way, we ran into some local kids, trying our Malay, they tried their English, and we laughed. At the same time, we were passing in front of a huge blue mosque. Great photo.

On the bus, I was in a seat without a back cushion, just a metal skeleton to my seat, while Nadine was chatting it up with a local girl on the bus, acquiring about the one Malay food we have to try, and about life in general. Great interactions in Kuantan.

The goal of our trip into the small village along the coast was to hopefully see large female green turtles trudge up to the beach and lay eggs. Since we were arriving towards the end of the season, odds weren't the best, but heck, let's give it a try anyways. After a great dinner with a French postal worker in a restaurant off the main road, Jacques (his last name wasn't Strap), we jumped in a little van heading to some protected beach where green turtles are known to lay eggs. We sat there close to the beach with Chris, first American encountered in SEA, and played with a styrofoam box full of baby green turtles that had just hatched. Just as their instinct told them to get to the ocean, they were crawling all over each other to get out of the box and to an unknown wet future. They start about the size of your hand, their sex is decided by the temperature of the ground where they are laid, close to a tree, boy, closer to the ocean, girl. A notice came in over the walkie-talkie, there had been a momma turtle spotted up the beach. Like a bunch of ducklings, we followed our guide up the beach in the pitch black dark. You can only imagine him saying, "Guys, I was just joking, there is no stinking turtles out tonight, now you have to find your way back to the van." We knew we hit the spot when we saw huge tracks across the sand that looked like those of a monster truck. That little turtle had grown up into a massive block of turtle. We received another message on the walkie-talkie, there is another turtle up the beach packing the sand around the eggs and now about to make its way back to the South China Sea. We were there just in time to see this green turtle dragging its heavy shell and body 50 yards across the sand. That was a site.

Then it was time to head back to the other turtle. The other turtle was in the process of laying 120 eggs! We sat there guessing how many eggs she was going to drop, and this was around egg 80. By the time she finished up, we were all just like that turtle, a little tired. It was 2 a.m. (1 in the afternoon back in Odessa). This all started at 10, and four hours later, we were back on the road again back to our bungalow.

We continued our track north to the islands of the Perhentians. There are two of them, the smaller Kecil, home for 3 nights, and the larger and quieter Besar, home for 2 nights. We spent our time on these two islands as a chance to relax, read, hike, swim, and do a little bit of snorkelling. We did all of these activities really well. I even think we are getting to the point where we could master them. We've had enough practice. Pulau Perhentian Kecil presented us with a nice little cross island hike among monitor lizards and mosquitoes. Pulau Perhentian Besat allowed us to snorkel among some huge reef and colorful fish. Considering the amount of snorkeling we have done, we should have bought a mask long ago. On Besar, we did just that. It worked perfectly.

We left the beaches and are now sitting here in the cool rainy hills of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands, home to many tea plantations that are exported all around the world. This is a welcome respite from the heat and humidity that we've encountered for the last two weeks. This will give us the opportunity to do a few travel errands and the most important one is to wash our clothes!!! You can only wash your clothes so many times by hand when they need a good ol' fashioned machine wash to eliminate the stink from three countries. They're downstairs right now as I type. Here is a view of downtown Tanah Rata. If you see a red or blue rainjacket, that would be us running around. http://www.heritage.com.my/cameron/index.htm#

As many of you may have heard, there was a coup d'etat in Thailand several days ago. This has created an interesting dilemma for us, head straight to Thailand or find an alternative route. Here is our conclusion. Other travellers and websites have mentioned that it is fine to travel Thailand, but maybe stay away from the capital for awhile. They will name an interim Prime Minister in a week. Soooo, we are going to head south down the eastern coast until Melaka, home of the once thriving world spice trade, head over into Indonesia and see some orangatans, cross back over to Malaysia and then go to Thailand.

We are enjoying our time traveling, hard to believe that yes, we are already a third of the way done. How time flies.

Some of you may notice that in every entry I write, I always take the chance to take a shot at New Mexico at least once. I do this at the request of 10 fingered Pepper. Honestly, what opportunity would I have to tell a Dutch couple about the education system, green chiles, or those crazy arroyos.

JW: "Yeah Hans, at least the education of this town is much better than that of New Mexico! You wouldn't want any child educated in that state's educational system."

Hans: "What do you have against Mexico?"

JW: "No Hans, its a state to the west of the great state of Texas."

Hans: "I didn't know there was a state called New Mexico."

JW: "Noone really does Hans. Noone."

Life is good. We are healthy. We still love each other. A concern of ours is that my brother, Charlie Ray, is being deployed to Iraq in a week. I definitely don't think he should be going there, but I do hope and pray that he remains safe.

Question #1 - What Malay number for 5 also doubles as the capital of this South American country? First person to get it correct will get there name in the title of the next blog entry.

If all my friends were to jump off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them, I'd be at the bottom to catch them. Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say. We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.
- Tim McGraw

Peace from Malaysia

JW

We have now finally made it to South East Asia, where we will be spending the majority of our travel time. We had been looking forward to this piece of our trip as it was probably going to be a bit more challenging and also more enlightening. We started off with our late night flight out of Sydney airport on Gulf Air. It was an overnight flight, and consequently we arrived in Singapore at 4:40 a.m. There are more people that you think awake at this insane hour. After finding a hostel that would take us at 7:00 in the morning, we set out on the MRT (Mass Railway Transit) to find our crappy little hostel, and the heat and humidity hit us hard. We were not used to the heat or the humidity for that matter after travelling in Australia and New Zealand for 2 months. Our clothes were instantly wet as we stepped outside. We have gotten into the habit of showering 3 times a day to curb the smell.

Once we settled into Singapore, we were able to try some of the local cuisine from the nearby food stalls. This was quite a cultural experience, as we were not completely sure what was in the food, and we were surrounded by locals in the stifling heat. As we continued our on tour through some of the major sights in Singapore, we encountered many friendly Singaporeans. They were eager to help us if we were lost, or even if we were not. We were able to visit the famous Raffles Hotel, which is a huge white complex (not just a hotel) built in the late 1800s by some Armenian immigrants. It gave us a little history of the building of the Singapore itself at the museum upstairs. We also had the opportunity to visit Sentosa island just a few kilometers south of Singapore itself. The best part was taking a cable car over from Singapore in order to get a bird's eye view of the area. On Sentosa, there was an amusement park feel, and we couldn't leave without trying one of the attractions. John's choice was the "luge", which was actually going down a semi-steep concrete path in a plastic cart with a brake. It was a pretty quick trip, but fun nonetheless. Also on Sentosa, was the southernmost point on the Asian continent, so that was pretty cool to be there even though we hadn't been hardly anywhere north of it!

I'll save on shampoo now!

The next day John decided that he needed a haircut. There was an Indian barber that would do it for just 5 Singapore dollars, so why not? John thought the best cut for travelling might be a buzz cut. As for you Texans, that's a burr. As all his blond hair was coming off, I was wondering if he might look a little funny, but it's a new "militaryish" look for him one could say. He can look very mean with that haircut if he wants to!

Our last activity was a Night Safari at the Singapore zoo. It sounds a bit corny, but it was actually very good. We saw lot of big animals, and it was a clever setup. Since it is nighttime, we couldn't see the cages, and in some instances there wasn't cages at all. There were moats separating us from the animals. We were joined on our Night Safari by a fellow traveller from Belgian named Herman. I told him about the "Herman the Worm" story, and he thought that was pretty amusing.

As for now, we have entered into Malaysia, and are enjoying the laid-back beach life so far. For now, selamat jalan.

Nadine

Unless you're willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won't happen. Phillip Adams (Australian)

As Nadine and I headed east on the train headed towards Melbourne on Nadine's birthday (September 1st in case you forgot), we were uncertain of what to expect of our encounter with the Bennett family. Upon walking into their living room and seeing a chocolate cake with a candle on top, we knew that our time together was going to be great.

We spent the weekend mostly relaxing with the fun Bennett bunch. To really be welcomed by/into the Bennett family, we went to a "barbie" put together by Chris, brother, uncle, family comedian. We spent the evening quizzing each other Aussie words and their American equivalents. Be careful talking about "rooting" for your favorite team in Australia, you will get some interesting looks.

We visited the normal sites, museums, parks, cultural places you wouldn't find in New Mexico, but what made our time in Melbourne great was the Bennett family. We met each other through a fellow educator, Joy C., who had switched places with the Bennetts early in the 90's in a teacher exchange. They offered to put us up for awhile and share a part of their life with us.

Big waves in front of the museum, no sharks

Terry took us to an Aussie Rules Football game between his team, Richmond, and West Coast. Unfortunately, his team lost by almost 100 points. I played basketball with David for an evening in his basketball league. It was great to run up and down the court. We didn't lose by the same margin as Richmond. We spent a night playing cards with Louisa (Lou), James (Jam), Anthony (Ant), and Kathy (Kat). Anthony, being the dealer, some how won. A little fishy. Rachel and I had some major battles over chess, the 12 year old came close to beating me, but not quite. Jess was ever the entertainer.

Rachel, Cathy, Jess, Big Terry, Cool Guy, Cool Girl

Nadine and I also had the pleasure of meeting one of Nadine's old class mates from Skutt High School in Omaha, Terry Packer. According to Nadine, he still looks the same other than the fact that he is 10 years older and an engineer living in Australia.

Due to the fact that we spent so much time with the Bennetts, a good thing, we only had 2 days in Sydney. It is kind of working due to the fact that the weather has been raining and our last day in Australia is set to be, well, raining. We plan on spending our last day in Australia on a whirlwind tour of Sydney, Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Skytower, and maybe a few other places we can fit in.

Nemo! Nemo! Where are you Nemo?

Hard to believe but we are already a third of the way through our Around the World trip and are passing from our stage of easy traveling in English speaking countries and a solid tourist infrastructure to foreign languages and possibly some more difficult traveling in third world countries for 5 months.

Chocolate makes life worth living. - Cathy Bennett

Life is good and we are both in good health and excited for another challenge.

JW

[/b]Don't wait or worry about tomorrow, just keep focused on what's happening today. -excerpt from Be A Dreamer

Since our last entry, Nadine and I had spent over a week in Cairns and the surrounding area enjoying some much needed warm weather. We are now in Melbourne and home of the Australian Football League Grand Final. Our Super Bowl. We flew from Cairns to Adelaide.

With several days in Adelaide, we explored multiple sites within the city center. Two of our favorite spots were Haigh's Factory and the Sushi King, both food related. Sushi King became a home away from hostel home by the fact that we ate there three times over 5 days. "Why eat sushi before going to South East Asia?" The sushi here was good and inexpensive. Plus, if you buy 3 rolls, you receive a free drink! Need I say more?

Secondly, probably one of our most anticipated activities was a tour of the Haigh's Chocolate Factory. This tour had a huge circle in our guidebook. We lined up like all of the other female chocolate afficionados and listened to our host talk about production of the coco bean while our minds were wandering to the free chocolate we were going to be tasting. I must admit that I personally dreamed of having a diving board on the edge of a pool of chocolate that we could optionally jump into at the end of the tour to most completely enjoy the warm liquid chocolate. The pool and diving board were unfortunately absent, but the free chocolate wasn't. We savored each bite as if we were professional chocolate judges. "Yes Nadine, that was a much more quality chocolate than that Hersheys bar we tried yesterday." To further our chocolate judging abilities, we bought several chocolate bars and truffles and sat outside carefully tasting each one. Our final decision, they were ALL great. Haigh's chocolate is not sold abroad, they use no advertising, no celebrity endorsers, just word of mouth over blog entries like this. Thus, we had to send a small box of pure joy for our parents. If you live close to Odessa or Omaha, you might consider visiting our parents to check on them and make sure they are doing alright and if, maybe, by some chance, they have some quality Australian chocolate lying around.

The one activity we were definitely going to participate in was visiting the wineries of the Barossa Valley, a valley renowned for its wine. After a few days exploring Adelaide, we set out north. Luckily, our bus driver notified us along the way of a wine and gourment food festival, creatively called Gourmet, coinciding with our visit to the valley. He let us know that the little hostel we wanted to stay at had been full 5 days ago. He suggested we try the Caravan Park in Tununda. Right on cue, we got the very last short trailer in the park, high living standards for any resident of New Mexico.

Once lodging had taken care of itself, we began walking towards Para Road, home of 4 wineries within walking or staggering distance, depending on your wine capacity. You can imagine us two backpackers sauntering on into the first winery with our t-shirt and zip-off pants and thinking to ourselves, "can we really just walk in and try all of the free wine we want?" As we saddled up to the testing bar, I casually looked at the list of wines we were able to taste, and calmly asked to try their finest Shiraz wine. And just like that, the girl handed me a glass with wine, and it was free. At that point, we both started quickly tasting several white, rose, and red wines and commenting to each other and the girl behind the bar how well you could truly savour that oak, vanilla, or fruity flavor in the wine. At the end of the bar was a large spittoon, to spit out all of the wine not pleasing to your own personal palate. Personally, how foolish was it to actually use the spittoon. After our last winery visit, we had the task of walking home in the cool stiff breeze in our aforementioned t-shirts, but feeling quite warm, chattering and laughing all the way down to our miniature mobile home at the caravan park. This is a walk the locals must see daily and call by a specific name, there goes the Para Road walk, those two.

As any traveler has while traveling, they have bright ideas from time to time, and yes, we both had one suggesting that we rent bikes and visit wineries outside the confines of walking. The next morning, after checking out of our short mobile home, we rented our mountain bikes with semi-flat tires and ungreased chains, and set off to our first winery on the map. The combination of our bikes less than robust condition, hills, and having had 4 winery tours under our belt the previous day, riding proved to be difficult. But being the adventerous and thrifty travellers we are, we continued on across paved and dirt roads, fields full of sheep, until we reached our first goal, the winery. We continued this track until the end of the early afternoon. We had visited another 5 wineries and had 4 bottles of savoury wine in our backpack. We had a long ride back with similar conditions as the previous day, lots of laughing, joking, smiling, all while on top of a bike and riding along the main intercity road. We reached our bags safely, boarded the bus, and headed back to Adelaide. The entire Barossa Valley wine tasting tour proved to be a great grape of a time, or as best as I can remember.

A goal we've had on this around the world trip is to volunteer and give back in some way for all that we have been receiving along the way. Nadine researched organizations, contacted people, and finally set up a volunteer experience on Kangaroo Island. We were volunteering with WWOOF as wwoofers. WWOOF is an acroynm for Willing Workers On Organic Farms. In a wwoofing situation, we as a couple, volunteered our services, manual labor usually, for half a day while our hosts provided us with food and a place to stay. We were fortunate enough to set up a wwoofing experience with Dean and Judy Johnson from American River on Kangaroo Island. We jumped on a bus down to the coast, hopped a ferry, rode on another shuttle, and we were there, at Muston Heights B@B. Dean welcomed us at the gate and drove us up the winding driveway past wallabies to their cozy little home. We were to be up the next morning ready for some work.

Next morning, we readied ourselves for a day of work. At the very early hour of 8:30 (5 in the afternoon local Texas time), we started our first half day of work. I kept busy outside mowing grass and pulling weeds, while Nadine did some gardening and inside cleaning. For us, it was great to be helping someone out, but more importantly, meeting authentic Aussies in their native environment of home and their farm. After we finished our morning work, we had time to visit the thriving town of American River, which is not actually on a river, but an inlet of the sea. The town is named after a few Americans built a boat on this inlet 200 years ago. After mailing two bottles of wine back to the States, we hiked a nice, lenghty nature trail back to the Muston Heights B&B.

Next day we worked the entire day mowing, cleaning, and setting some rock down for their garden so we could earn a full day to explore Kangaroo Island the next day.

Our destination on our free day was Kangaroo Island and all of its furry treasures and some not so furry. Originally Kangaroo Island earned its name from a large number of British and French sailors who found an overwhelming number of kangaroos on the island.

Reaching further back in history, the word kangaroo is an Aboriginal word. When Captain Cook initially interacted with the Aboriginals, he asked what the name of the hopping marsupial was, he misunderstood their response. They answered kangaroo. From then on, the British called the kangaroo, a, well, kangaroo. The word kangaroo in the Aboriginal language doesn't refer to the animal, but actually means "I don't know." Thus, when the Aboriginals were asked what that animal was, they said "I don't know," and the explorers took it to be the name for the kangaroo. They really messed that one up. That takes us back to an important lesson, communication is the key.

With a day to spare and a car at our disposal, Nadine and I immediately drove halfway through idyllic red ochre roads to a Koala Park. It was here that we walked around staring at the groggy koalas hanging out in the eucalyptus trees. We counted 10 in total, Nadine spotting 9 of them. That was an impressive sight. We continued on to Flinders Chase National Park. We were walking up to the Visitors Center looking at a sign that told you to remember to know your license plate number for your park pass, when I spotted a small, red kangaroo just chillin' in the sun. He blended right into the scenery! He did not seem disturbed by our presence, so we snapped a few pics and stared at him for a while in disbelief.

"John, are there really kangaroos on Kangaroo Island?"

I'm holding up The Remarkables

From the rangers station, we drove down to Admiral's Arch seal colony. Here we found hundreds of New Zealand seals, I do hope they have their visas in order, lying on the beach, swimming, eating and fighting. All the while, the tide was coming in with huge waves crashing against the rocks. This time of the season, the seals have just given birth a couple of months ago and baby seals are suckling.

Up the coast is the location of the Remarkables. A set of rocks that shot up from the ocean as magma and have taken on some unique forms from erosion over thousands of years. This place rendered several great photo opportunities.

Time dictated we return to American River before the sun came down and we would be more likely to hit something in the Johnson's car. At the end of the day, we had seen some koalas, a porcupine, kangaroo, 2 tiger snakes (very poisonous, Nadine shouldn't have been playing with them), large lizard, and hundreds of humans.

Our hosts Judy and Dean are some great people and have had some great life experiences. Both are close to my parents age and keep a very busy work schedule farming, cleaning, flying, cooking, maintaining a B&B, washing, and everything in between. Dean also flies planes. On a weekly basis he flies back and forth between Adelaide and Kangaroo Island. Over our time with them, Judy put together some great meals. During the evening, we sat around the fire laughing, talking, and watching tv. There was an English version of the Amazing Race that had travelled to Kangaroo Island and Dean helped fly a few teams around the island and across to the mainland. There were also feautured just a month ago on a television show called, Postcards. It's a show that features interesting parts of Southern Australia. http://www.postcards.sa.com.au/ Click on the title Kangaroo Island Flights and that is there place.

The entire experience of working, sharing, and being with them as a wwoofer was very rewarding. We would do it again in a heartbeat. When it came time to return to Adelaide, we had the unique opportunity of going by Dean's plane. The flight over afforded a fantastic view of Kangaroo Island and the coast line. Dean allowed me to take control of the plane for a bit and maintain the plane level with the horizon. It was also at this point that Dean took control of the plane back and performed a little roller coaster move, pull back on the controls and following it with a dip of the plane which left Nadine screaming and also blaming me for that maneuver.

Answers to last weeks questions

1) Cyclones only happen in the Southern hemisphere while hurricanes take place in the Northern hemisphere. 1A) Makes you wonder why Iowa State is called the Cyclones. I know Nate must be scratching is head about that one.

2) Nadine and I actually saw one of these in the wild recently.

Questions for this week

1) How many of the worlds most deadliest snakes are found in Australia?

2) How many of these did Nadine and I see so far in Australia?

Photos will be added to this entry shortly.

Cheers
JW