Author archive
10 September 2009
Porto or Oporto is home to Port Wine. The city centre is very much a Paris-wannabe like Buenos Aires and Montevideo … with wide boulevards and beautiful classy buildings on both sides. Text continues after this gallery. The old city or Ribeiro is located slightly downhill on the river bank. It is rundown […]
9 September 2009
We travelled up the country through very boring landscape by bus (3.5 hours). The long distance buses are extremely new and comfortable. We arrived in Porto to realise that the Red Bull air race would be on the day we leave for Paris! Coincidentally Kim had his Red Bull airshow cap around town … from […]
8 September 2009
One of the highlights of Lisbon is Sintra, located about 45 minutes out of town. It has an Moorish castle plus a few villas and palaces dotted around the unusually green hilly landscape. Due to the distance and topography, it is essential to get around these sights by bus … and that itself is rather […]
7 September 2009
We took a public tram (number 28) uphill to an old part of the city called Alfama. It was very picturesque as the tram ding-dinged its way through the steep narrow streets where it was so narrow you could touch the houses on either side. There had been about two-tramloads of people waiting. Imagine if […]
6 September 2009
We did an online check-in for British Airways last night and it said on the Boarding Pass that bag-drop opens at 0500. So we thought we’d be able to drop our bags after breakfast then head into the city for a few hours and return to the airport for boarding the evening flight. Unfortunately when […]
5 September 2009
We met a former colleague of mine, Catherine for lunch today at a Malaysian restaurant Jom Makan just off Trafalgar Square. Mmmm, very yummy. Then we met friends of Kim at a wine bar before going to a West End show. It was my very first time at a London show despite my previous visits. […]
4 September 2009
With the time change from New Zealand to the UK, day is night and night is day. We’ve previously found that if we stay up till about 6pm then getting a good night sleep, our body clocks will be more or less fine in a couple of days. That’s our way of putting our right […]
3 September 2009
We had a stressful departure as Kim had bought a Navman GPS for driving around the UK … after loading the UK/Europe maps it stopped working. Fortunately we live closed to the Navman warehouse and they opened up after hours so he could swap the unit out. It is funny that once things like that […]
19 August 2009
With a friend from Hong Kong coming for dinner, I had to learn some new dishes. Ayam Tempera and Sayu Lodeh it is for tonight. Posted by Alex Chan on Tuesday, August 18, 2009
26 July 2009
Above: Great Barrier Reef flying from Cairns. Flying on standby can be nerve-wrecking, especially when flights are busy and don’t run every day. We returned the rental car at Cairns airport. We were pleased to have boarding passes issued to us for the 1130 flight, not minding that we were stuck at the tail of […]