Another adventure begins…

We’re off to Melbourne Airport for our 14 hour flight to Vientiane, via Bangkok. I am glad to be writing this entry because I have had many conversations over the preceding weeks about how to pronounce Laos… a friend who has it on good authority from a guy that is from there believes that it is said “Layos”. These and many other mysteries should be solved over the coming weeks. I think that the Yanzi is off the itinerary which is sad, as it was the one big thing that I wanted to see, but it is sadder for the 100,000 people that have been displaced due to the spring floods. It is more like a humanitarian disaster than a tourist destination at the moment. We’ll get to see the scummy end of the Yanzi in Shanghai.

So travel with us as we blog our way around Laos (Layos) and Southern China.

You have gotta love the Pound Stirling!

After spending what seemed like days at Heathrow airport, we decided to have one last pub meal… No supprises what I had – Burger and chips and Philippa managed to down her last brittish pint.

Sitting there, clacking glasses together and chanting Cheers, Skol, Prost and whatever other bits of various languages we had managed to pick up, it finally dawned on me that we where heading home. I showed my dutch passport to the appropriately grumpy brit lady after joining the perfectly formed queue for the last time and boarded our plane for Bangkok (ever heard the one about the man who walked through the metal detector sideways??).

The flight, as usual was uneventful, and Bangkok was just as we remembered it – dirty, smelly, sleezy yet somehow wonderful. With only a few days in town – we spent most of our time shopping. It was rather liberating going to the markets and not having to haggle for a decent price to much as we already -kinda- knew what everything was worth. In fact, it took some of the fun out of it (for the shop-keepers and us). After just three days of shopping, we jumped on another flight down to Phuket – think Thai Gold Coast!

I’m sick of writing…off to the beach 😉

God Jul…aaaaah Swedish Kebabs…

Swedish New YearHow can you describe our 10 days in Sweden? We basically ate and ate and drank and played 500 and ate some more. Good times really. Our friends Pete and Kate kindly hosted us over Christmas and we had a wonderful cultural experience. Matt almost swears he can speak Swedish now, he actually is pretty good and understands about 70percent of what is going on. We arrived pretty exhausted after packing up the house and due to the long dark evenings we managed to fit in about 12hours sleep a night, bit like going into hybernation.

On Christmas evening the snow flakes came down and we enjoyed about 70cm of snow. It really brighted up the place and created a lot more fun and games (Matt invented a new game which involves throwing a snow ball at Pete and almost breaking his leg). Evertime we got into the car we had to scrape and brush it down, we had to shovel the snow, sweep it, brush it off our feet…really high maintenance living really. But still wonderful…Christmas is really designed for winter…well our traditions are at least.

We bought some small fire works and with the rest of Ljungby contibuted to the 360degree firework display that brought us into the 2006 (no fire restrictions to worry about). The local counsel has the right idea just legalise fireworks then you don’t have to pay for a public display. And the Ljungby locals spent alot of money on fireworks between them.

After 10 days of relaxing and some post-Christmas-sale shopping we packed our bags and waved Pete, Kate and Olivia off as we were wisked away on the 5.36am Swedish trains. Swedish trains are great!

The day was long, Lgungby to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Stansted (London), Stansted to Heathrow, 9 hours waiting for check in to open and trying to reclaim some tax,…duty free shopping at Heathrow (our credit card didn’t see that coming and my long time dream to own a Swatch watch was fullfiled), then Heathrow to Bangkok….where it is hight time that Matt does some blogging.