by Rachel Visiting Ha Long Bay yesterday was our one foray out of Hanoi and what a great day it was! The 2.5-3 hour drive each way made for a long day, but the weather was perfect for a boat ride and the bay was beautiful. According to our guide, Vietnamese legend says that the …
Singapore Interlude
by Neil We arrived in Singapore on March 29th and entered a world I could never have imagined. Nothing anyone could have told me would have prepared me for this experience. Singapore is Wow, just Wow. It is hard to find an appropriate adjective, but take your pick; exotic, energetic, diverse, world class, world leader, …
Bia Hoi
by Neil So, Hanoi has this great tradition, custom, ritual, whatever you wish to call it called Bia Hoi. This translates as "New Beer" and it's pretty straight forward. Beer is brewed at the brewery in Hanoi with no preservatives added, so the beer has a shelf life of less than 24 hours. Vendors collect …
Singapore
By Pippa We arrived in Singapore on the 29th of March. Like in the Cook Islands and Sri Lanka, Singapore is humid. Very, very humid. Also, Singapore is like one gigantic garden! Since it's so humid plants can pretty much grow rampant, but the gardeners keep it looking fantastic! The weird thing was when we arrived …
Adelaide Murals
By Neil Like many major cities, Adelaide has its fair share of graffiti. Whatever your views on the artistic merits of this form of expression it's fair to say that not everyone appreciates it and it is not going anywhere soon. The question is always one of how a city administration responds. In Adelaide, there …
Sri Lankan interlude
By Neil Where to begin? We were only in Sri Lanka for ten days and only saw a tiny part of the country, so our perspective is admittedly limited. Sri Lanka, I think it is fair to say, was well beyond anything we had expected; a true culture shock. That's not meant to imply anything …
Rotorua’s geothermal activity
By Pippa If you ever visit Rotorua one of the first things you’ll noticed is the strange smell that will appear in random places. You could be walking down the street looking in shops and then suddenly, this stink forces its way up your nose. Then you might look at the person next to you …
The green and rolling hills of New Zealand’s north island
By Rachel Looking back through our blog posts I feel like we short-changed New Zealand. We spent two weeks there and saw beautiful landscapes. Unfortunately the weather wasn't the greatest - lots of gray, rainy days - but it was green, it was rolling, and when the sun came out the ocean was blue as …
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The first post of November
This is officially the first post of November!(Cue theme song). Anyhow, I was told to write about trees, but I really didn't feel like writing about that so I decided that I would write about what it's like Down Under. Since New Zealand is basically also Down Under, I'll talk about that First. First Question, …
Reflections on the Cook Islands
by Neil Reflections on the Cook Islands Rarotonga, capital of the Cook Islands is a rare slice of paradise at first glance. I could see myself living there----almost. It is a place of contrasts that juxtaposes the idyllic with the distasteful. Christianity arrived relatively late in the Cook Islands, with the first missionaries arriving in …
A year of discovery 