Ok, we've finally got around to finishing our dancing video. We've posted it to YouTube but hopefully you'll be able to view it below. Well.......Enjoy! :)
Monday, October 26, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
End of the Road
Ok, so this is it! We’ve been travelling since 6th March 2009 and after all that time on the road, 
we have finally reached our destination: Australia! It is sad to leave the backpacking behind us, but at this stage, we are looking forward to having somewhere more permanent to live and to have a home. We are currently trying to organise employment.....it’s been a while so we hope we remember how to do everything!
We’ve been in Australia now for 2½ weeks already. We spent the first week in Sydney with our friends Barry and Emily, and then the next week and a half with Conor’s brother John and his wife Kate in Canberra. So far, in our short time in Oz, we have checked out the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House and also managed to get a close up look at some wild Kangaroos bouncing around a hill near John and Kate’s house.
we have finally reached our destination: Australia! It is sad to leave the backpacking behind us, but at this stage, we are looking forward to having somewhere more permanent to live and to have a home. We are currently trying to organise employment.....it’s been a while so we hope we remember how to do everything!
We’ve been in Australia now for 2½ weeks already. We spent the first week in Sydney with our friends Barry and Emily, and then the next week and a half with Conor’s brother John and his wife Kate in Canberra. So far, in our short time in Oz, we have checked out the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House and also managed to get a close up look at some wild Kangaroos bouncing around a hill near John and Kate’s house.
Some facts about our trip......
Time travelling: 6.5 months
Countries visited: 15 (USA, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, South Korea)
Miles travelled: Unknown!
No of separate flights: 25
No of different hostels/guesthouse stayed in: 74
Size and weight of our bags: 45L weighing 8-10kg
Modes of transport used: Walking, bicycle, motorbike, horse, tuktuk, car, pickup, bus, boat, tram, train, helicopter, plane.
No of nights spent sleeping on overnight busses/trains/boats/flights: 20
No of rats encountered in our rooms: 2
No of Irish pubs visited: 5
No of weddings missed: 1 (sorry Henry!)
No of photographs taken: 12,500 (that’s 46 GB)
No of embarrassing dancing videos: 68
No of blog entries: 83 (well done to anyone who’s read them all!)
No of old friends met along the way: 13 (Darin, Stan, Cónall, Ena, Fenton & Angela, Marcel, Myra & Graham, Helen & JP, Charlie & Pippa)
No of new friends met along the way: Too many to count, but special mention to the slow-boater in Laos!
Most useful items packed: Laptop, guidebooks....it would have been very different without them
Least useful items packed: Water purification tablets, rain cover for our rucksacks, PADI dive manual (we had to buy a new one when we started the course anyway)
Things we wished we brought: Map of the world (to show where Estonia is!)
Most luxurious place slept: Las Vegas (with Sapa, Vietnam a close second)
Least luxurious places slept: Hut in jungle in Thailand, Four Thousand Islands in Laos, Piste in Mexico
Items lost/stolen: None!
Length of time since Conor last had a hair cut: 7 months (and counting!)
Length of time since our last skydives: Too long!
No of Seven New Wonders of the World visited: 4/7 (Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Rio Statue of Christ, Chinese Great Wall)
We will miss:
- Exploring new and famous places
- Complete freedom to go wherever we want
- Some great cheap food and beer
- Not working
We will not miss:
- Brushing teeth with bottled water
- Wearing the same clothes everyday
- Constantly finding new places to stay
- Night busses
Well, we hope you enjoyed reading our blog along the way. As we’ve reached our destination, we don’t intend to keep it going, but fear not, this is not our last blog entry!!! Stay tuned as we are currently working on the video of embarrassing dances around the world and we’ll post it here whenever it’s ready.
Time travelling: 6.5 months
Countries visited: 15 (USA, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, South Korea)
Miles travelled: Unknown!
No of separate flights: 25
No of different hostels/guesthouse stayed in: 74
Size and weight of our bags: 45L weighing 8-10kg
Modes of transport used: Walking, bicycle, motorbike, horse, tuktuk, car, pickup, bus, boat, tram, train, helicopter, plane.
No of nights spent sleeping on overnight busses/trains/boats/flights: 20
No of rats encountered in our rooms: 2
No of Irish pubs visited: 5
No of weddings missed: 1 (sorry Henry!)
No of photographs taken: 12,500 (that’s 46 GB)
No of embarrassing dancing videos: 68
No of blog entries: 83 (well done to anyone who’s read them all!)
No of old friends met along the way: 13 (Darin, Stan, Cónall, Ena, Fenton & Angela, Marcel, Myra & Graham, Helen & JP, Charlie & Pippa)
No of new friends met along the way: Too many to count, but special mention to the slow-boater in Laos!
Most useful items packed: Laptop, guidebooks....it would have been very different without them
Least useful items packed: Water purification tablets, rain cover for our rucksacks, PADI dive manual (we had to buy a new one when we started the course anyway)
Things we wished we brought: Map of the world (to show where Estonia is!)
Most luxurious place slept: Las Vegas (with Sapa, Vietnam a close second)
Least luxurious places slept: Hut in jungle in Thailand, Four Thousand Islands in Laos, Piste in Mexico
Items lost/stolen: None!
Length of time since Conor last had a hair cut: 7 months (and counting!)
Length of time since our last skydives: Too long!
No of Seven New Wonders of the World visited: 4/7 (Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Rio Statue of Christ, Chinese Great Wall)
We will miss:
- Exploring new and famous places
- Complete freedom to go wherever we want
- Some great cheap food and beer
- Not working
We will not miss:
- Brushing teeth with bottled water
- Wearing the same clothes everyday
- Constantly finding new places to stay
- Night busses
Well, we hope you enjoyed reading our blog along the way. As we’ve reached our destination, we don’t intend to keep it going, but fear not, this is not our last blog entry!!! Stay tuned as we are currently working on the video of embarrassing dances around the world and we’ll post it here whenever it’s ready.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Seoul of Asia
The final country of our travels (before Australia) was South Korea. Admittedly it is an odd destination, it is certainly not on the backpacker hitlist, and we didn’t meet anyone along the way who was going there or had been there. In fact, we never planned to go there ourselves! We originally intended to go to Japan, but when we were purchasing tickets, we found that flights from Japan to Sydney were very expensive and we could save €1000 each by flying from their next door neighbour: South Korea. Along the way, our plans to visit Japan were dropped and so South Korea became the last destination of our backpacking.
What struck us as odd initially was the distinct lack of English (throughout Asia, we had become
accustomed to English signs and menus etc everywhere). Even the Starbucks sign was written in Korean! As mentioned in our previous post, most of the ATMs didn’t have any English – even those that did have some English usually gave us a Korean error message before spitting out our cards (thankfully we did eventually find one that liked our cards). There were also very few foreigners about – of course we were the subject of photos for a few people that wanted to pose with us. It’ll be tough giving up this celebrity lifestyle in Australia!So what did we get up to in Seoul?
We checked out the N Seoul Tower. A large tower built up on a hill in the middle of the city, which offered great views of the city. But the best bit was definitely the view from the urinals.....check out the picture below! After 15 countries, Conor can safely say that these are the BEST TOILETS IN THE WORLD!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Blog Updates
Apologies for the delays in updating the blog recently. As most of you are probably aware, we’ve now reached Australia and have been taking it easy, catching up with friends and basically enjoying doing nothing. But stay tuned....we still have a few more entries to post.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
From China to South Korea
We had heard that it was possible to get a Ferry from China to Korea. We were keen to do as much of our trip as possible without flying but doing so proved more difficult than expected.
For starters the ferry company website was only in Chinese and Korean and none of the travel agents we found seemed to be able to help us. Our guidebook was of very limited help but we eventually found an office that sells tickets – only to be told that they couldn’t sell them to US because we weren’t Chinese, Japanese or Korean (they couldn’t be sure if we would be allowed into Korea). So we would have to go to the port to buy them before we leave. This was cutting things a bit close, because there are only 2 ferry sailings a week and if we missed the Sunday one, then the next one would be Thursday which would be too late for us to catch our flight to Sydney. The ferry port is actually in a town called Tanggu, about 200km from Beijing.
Nevertheless, we set off on Saturday evening, taking the train to a place called Tianjin. That was
pretty cool because this is apparently the fastest intercity train in the world and travels at 330 km/h. We covered the 120km trip to Tianjin in just 30 minutes – less time than it took us to get from our Beijing Hostel to the train station. In fact, we were very impressed with how modern the train station and train was – it was by far the most modern we’ve seen, the station was more like an airport. Who said travelling in China was difficult?
We spent the night in Tianjin which turned out to be a very nice city. It was immediately clear that this place doesn’t get any tourists because (1) our guidebook had very little to say about it (2) nobody speaks ANY English (3) we foreigners were a bit of a novelty and had to pose for a number of camera-phone photos. All this was surprising as we later learned that it’s the 6th largest city in China with 11 million people!
Thankfully, we were able to buy tickets there at the port but getting onto the boat proved to be another ordeal. For a start, it didn’t help that the name on Conor’s boarding pass was “Conor Eireannach Irish” (Tanggu port officials are obviously not familiar with the layout of Irish passports). Also, the fact that Conor’s hair now looks significantly different from his passport photo prompted suspicious staring and further questions from the immigration official. We were both pulled aside while some senior official scrutinized our passports and checked against his list, however, in the end we were both allowed onto the ferry.....horray :)
the only ones. The food was all unusual looking stuff and since everything was written in Korean and no one had any English, we didn’t really know what we were eating. The sight of a young child peeing into a paper cup at the dinner table was a little off putting (but apparently it’s normal here as no one else noticed)!
After 28 hours on the boat, we finally arrived in South Korea. We will spend 5 days around the capital Seoul before flying to Australia on Friday. Our initial thoughts are one of surprise about the technology here: This is a modern developed country but it’s the first country in all the places we’ve been where our phones don’t work and the ATMs don’t offer instructions in English.
For starters the ferry company website was only in Chinese and Korean and none of the travel agents we found seemed to be able to help us. Our guidebook was of very limited help but we eventually found an office that sells tickets – only to be told that they couldn’t sell them to US because we weren’t Chinese, Japanese or Korean (they couldn’t be sure if we would be allowed into Korea). So we would have to go to the port to buy them before we leave. This was cutting things a bit close, because there are only 2 ferry sailings a week and if we missed the Sunday one, then the next one would be Thursday which would be too late for us to catch our flight to Sydney. The ferry port is actually in a town called Tanggu, about 200km from Beijing.
Nevertheless, we set off on Saturday evening, taking the train to a place called Tianjin. That was
pretty cool because this is apparently the fastest intercity train in the world and travels at 330 km/h. We covered the 120km trip to Tianjin in just 30 minutes – less time than it took us to get from our Beijing Hostel to the train station. In fact, we were very impressed with how modern the train station and train was – it was by far the most modern we’ve seen, the station was more like an airport. Who said travelling in China was difficult?
We spent the night in Tianjin which turned out to be a very nice city. It was immediately clear that this place doesn’t get any tourists because (1) our guidebook had very little to say about it (2) nobody speaks ANY English (3) we foreigners were a bit of a novelty and had to pose for a number of camera-phone photos. All this was surprising as we later learned that it’s the 6th largest city in China with 11 million people!
Thankfully, we were able to buy tickets there at the port but getting onto the boat proved to be another ordeal. For a start, it didn’t help that the name on Conor’s boarding pass was “Conor Eireannach Irish” (Tanggu port officials are obviously not familiar with the layout of Irish passports). Also, the fact that Conor’s hair now looks significantly different from his passport photo prompted suspicious staring and further questions from the immigration official. We were both pulled aside while some senior official scrutinized our passports and checked against his list, however, in the end we were both allowed onto the ferry.....horray :)
the only ones. The food was all unusual looking stuff and since everything was written in Korean and no one had any English, we didn’t really know what we were eating. The sight of a young child peeing into a paper cup at the dinner table was a little off putting (but apparently it’s normal here as no one else noticed)!After 28 hours on the boat, we finally arrived in South Korea. We will spend 5 days around the capital Seoul before flying to Australia on Friday. Our initial thoughts are one of surprise about the technology here: This is a modern developed country but it’s the first country in all the places we’ve been where our phones don’t work and the ATMs don’t offer instructions in English.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
A week in Mainland China
Our short time in China started with a 24 hour train journey from Hong Kong to Beijing (we had thought about spending that time watching a full series of 24, but then decided against it). 
Considering that we had completely under-researched this section of the trip, everything went much easier than expected. On the train we had a 4 bed cabin all to ourselves and the journey was very smooth. Covering 2,000km in just one day in such comfort is a stark contrast from the bumpy bus journeys with frequent stops that we had become accustomed to in South East Asia and the change was very welcome. And not only that, when we got to Beijing, we finally had a chance to tell the immigration officials what we think of them......yes, after they stamp your passport, you are given a keypad in which you press a button to indicate if their service was Very Satisfactory / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Unsatisfactory. Didn’t have the balls to press Very Unsatisfactory just in case they pulled our passports back! All in all, rather painless going from Hong Kong to Beijing.
Arriving in Beijing provides a good lesson in feeling very, very small. The population is about 16 million but looking beyond population numbers, the buildings and streets and open areas are just enormous! The train station we walked out of was massive and the 10-lane dual carriageway in front of us was just a typical street forming the blocks of the city. However, despite its scale it struck us as a very clean, organised and orderly place....suppose 
this is what Communist HQ should look like! We stayed in a quieter backstreet area of the city that had real character – recommended to us by Conor’s friend John Pender who had visited here recently and it was really nice (thanks John!) One thing we’ve noticed from travelling to larger cities is that there are so many locals, the tourists tend to get “diluted” and so there are fewer people trying to sell you stuff or offer taxi/accommodation etc. However, both of us being taller and fairer than the average Chinese person, we did get plenty of stares.....it sure is a funny feeling walking into a restaurant and having eye contact with everyone that you look to.
Considering that we had completely under-researched this section of the trip, everything went much easier than expected. On the train we had a 4 bed cabin all to ourselves and the journey was very smooth. Covering 2,000km in just one day in such comfort is a stark contrast from the bumpy bus journeys with frequent stops that we had become accustomed to in South East Asia and the change was very welcome. And not only that, when we got to Beijing, we finally had a chance to tell the immigration officials what we think of them......yes, after they stamp your passport, you are given a keypad in which you press a button to indicate if their service was Very Satisfactory / Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory / Very Unsatisfactory. Didn’t have the balls to press Very Unsatisfactory just in case they pulled our passports back! All in all, rather painless going from Hong Kong to Beijing.
Arriving in Beijing provides a good lesson in feeling very, very small. The population is about 16 million but looking beyond population numbers, the buildings and streets and open areas are just enormous! The train station we walked out of was massive and the 10-lane dual carriageway in front of us was just a typical street forming the blocks of the city. However, despite its scale it struck us as a very clean, organised and orderly place....suppose 
this is what Communist HQ should look like! We stayed in a quieter backstreet area of the city that had real character – recommended to us by Conor’s friend John Pender who had visited here recently and it was really nice (thanks John!) One thing we’ve noticed from travelling to larger cities is that there are so many locals, the tourists tend to get “diluted” and so there are fewer people trying to sell you stuff or offer taxi/accommodation etc. However, both of us being taller and fairer than the average Chinese person, we did get plenty of stares.....it sure is a funny feeling walking into a restaurant and having eye contact with everyone that you look to.
In Beijing city, we visited the main touristy areas....Tiananmen Square, the world’s largest public square (can hold up to a million people) and the scene of a government assault on pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989: the government sent tanks in and opened fire on the crowd, killing a load of people. Today, security is tight around the square and you need to pass bags through an x-ray 
before you can get access. We also checked out the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace where the Emperors used to live. The Forbidden City is so called because it was off limits for 500 years – the price of uninvited admission was instant execution (a bit like Tiananmen square)! The Summer Palace was their summer retreat. One Empress expanded the Palace using money earmarked for the Navy. To satisfy the navy, she built a large ship made of marble to decorate the lake. We guess they weren’t so happy about that. The hill at the Palace offered some very nice views of the city.
However, our main reason for visiting Beijing (and China in fact) was to see the Great Wall of China, and indeed it was Great! We spent a day walking 8km along a stretch of the wall (from Jinshanling to Simatai). Being a bit further from Beijing than other sections of the wall, and being a bit dilapidated in places (i.e. a bit more natural and less reconstructed than some 
other sections) meant that the wall we visited was not overrun with tourists and we got to see it in a purer form. The walk was quite steep in places and also a bit dangerous as sections of the wall had crumbled away, but we got some fantastic views along the way and it was indeed a Great Walk of China (ha ha ha).
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