Arriving home to a bumper harvest

Above:  This is one month’s harvest from Nyoman. We landed back in Auckland early in the morning.  We returned to the house to find a bumper harvest from our cat Nyoman.  Marie (my friend, schoolmate and travel companion … turned catsitter and housesitter) had been harvesting the hair from the cat each time she was […]

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Happy ending

The weather in New Norcia cleared and we were finally able to admire the exterior of the town’s buildings. Text continues after this gallery.     Driving down from new Norcia to Perth Airport, we had a couple of hours to kill.   We called into McDonald’s for free internet and realised that our flight scheduled […]

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Monastic town of New Norcia

The 0500 arrival into Perth meant that we’d have trouble resting our sleep-deprived heads in a hotel unless we paid for the night before.  Because of this, we drove straight to New Norcia, less than 2 hours outside of Perth. For a combination of reasons, we still arrived at New Norcia Hotel too early at […]

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Motorcycle Grand Prix

We had a late night departure tonight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth at 2350.  It was going to be another day of lazy gluttony when Kim found out that the Motorcycle Grand Prix was on at nearby Sepang racetrack.  Wow!  Just the sheer chance of that!  And the fact that we got our hotel room […]

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Old Kiwi icon that turned Malaysian

Day of Indulgence We have a full day or indulgence in KL.  This is great city of eating.  The relative affluence means that you can enjoy all the traditional flavours without sacrificing quality … unlike rural Indonesia, chickens aren’t the size of a quail! After the disappointment of exploring new malls early this year in […]

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Eating on AirAsia

  Airplane food is bad right? Think again. AirAsia has demonstrated that the tastiest cuisines can be packaged and… Posted by Alex Chan on Friday, October 23, 2009

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Back to the Big Smoke

We arrived at Kuala Lumpur, the Big Smoke, on AirAsia departing at 1955.  During the flight, I was standing in the front of the cabin waiting for the loo … so I looked back and saw two of the flight attendants doing the sale of merchandise (t-shirts, caps, toys etc). One crew member was helping […]

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Oh the humidity!

The sun rises very early in Makassar, not quite as bad as in Manado but it is still very bright at five something.  We had decided on an early start to beat the heat. Out the door at 0800, it wasn’t too hot yet. But within minutes we were drenched from the humidity.  We went […]

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End of an adventure

We took the bus back down to Makassar today.  It was meant to be 8 hours but it took 9h40 … allowing for one flat tyre, comfort stops and picking up passengers. This is the end of my Tana Toraja adventure.  It is one of the most interesting trips I’ve ever done.  Normally everything of […]

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Market day

Pasar Bolu The market in Bolu (near Rantepao) isn’t a weekly affair … but occurs every six days.  We were lucky to catch it despite our short stay of only three full days. In summary, people bring their buffaloes and pigs here so other people can come make their purchases: The buffalo section is essentially […]

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