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Out of Laos and into the Maelstrom

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  Goodbye, dear Laos We finally made it out of Laos, with copious paperwork and hurried scurrying on the border control. The friendly border guard took pity on us and upgraded our bike visa to 6 months. We can only stay two on our visas, but its nice to know the bike can have a little holiday of its own. The ride down south to Bangkok was somewhat fleeting- we had less than 48 hours to be in Bangkok, to pick Sue and Steve up from the airport. I can remember a lot of blurred trees racing past, and swerving lumpy tarmac at 100kph. We stopped overnight in Nong Khai, and ventured out to find food. We didn't find any. But we did find a gaggle of chinese dragons, enormous and curling round and round with people running round underneath. There was strange deafening cymbal music in the background, and fireworks, exploding far too close with the sparks falling on the audience and people hiding and covering their ears. In the middle there was an altar with people worshipping in th...
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Pimps, prostitutes,orangutans and volcanoes

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After the surreal Kuala Lumpur experience, we discovered our original plan was somewhat bereft of reality.  As in, it wasn’t going to happen. We had decided to head further south to hop across to Sumatra at Melaka.  We hadn’t, however, taken into account that there was in fact no way of getting the bike there.   This meant we were in for a longish trek north again, back the way we’d come, to cross from Penang to Medan, northern Sumatra.    An uneventful motorway day saw us rock up in Georgetown, Penang, and hoof it to the ferry office to ask about tickets the next day.  They gaped at us when they saw the bike, and once again, we wished we had planned ahead slightly.  There is no car ferry.  There are smelly little passenger ferries, and for transportation, there are ‘onion boats’.   We scarpered, and, once ensconced in a rip-off hotel room that smelt of sewers, wandered around the backstreets, peeking into the ancient Chinese shop ho...
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Post-script to the Final Ride: A Long Way 'Home', and Settling into Pepper-Packin'

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  Hello, Sorry for the delay, the long-suffering keyboard has finally give up the ghost... I am typing with an onscreen one.  The word 'onscreen' just then took approx 1 minute to write. Anyway, this is the post-final-ride final ride.  The one that takes us up to where we will be living and working for the next 6 months.  We left Phil and Karolina after a week in Surfers Paradise, with the tanned surf boys running about barefoot and the skimpily clad promoter-girls in bikinis and gold platforms.   We meandered along an alternative route back up north to Ayr on some very good dirt tracks.     They were places where even the 8-year olds wore cowboy hats, where the service station women stop just short of actually growling at you, and where homesteads were called things like 'Why Not'.  (As far as I was concerned there were some very good answers to that. They included '1. snakes', '2. wretched desert', '3. total lack of drink...
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