Kia ora, Our Cook Islands stay is coming to an end. As I sit here on the deck at Vara’s starting to tap in this post, coconuts fall, fish in the lagoon splash around and the bloody mozzies are out. They have to be here don’t um. That’s one of the things we are looking forward to back on the motherland, no mozzies, well at least not on the scale of the eastern world.

Right were do I start, what a month we have had travelling around New Zealand, and the best part is we do it all again in 2 weeks time. This is the same as the last post, I really can’t find time to write what we are up too, resulting in short up dates. Still better then none.

To keep it short and sweet, Melbourne is one cool city, NSW south coast still rips for waves, and Sydney is ready for us in a few months time, so where are we now?

A place where everyone is a bro and cheddar is pronounced cheetah…..You got it....Kiwi land.

Pemberton, Walpole, Albany and Esperance are a few places we have been and seen. Pemberton’s known for its Karri woodland and they sure do have a lot of it. The highlight would be scaling the Gloucester tree. A once an upon a time manned fire lookout. 8 hours a day workers would be scanning for smoke 60 meters up from forest floor level, perched on a swaying platform with only the birds for company. It was interesting reading the journal a lady left behind while posted there in the 50’s. She wrote “I find it very relaxing” can’t be a bad way to spend your days surely?

Soooooo what have we been up too. Well we finished our working stint over a week ago, so without wasting a second we took off on the Indian Ocean Drive in our trusty crap camper to see the iconic pinnacles desert which lies 250km north of Mandurah. A few hours later and we rolled quietly into the desert on the semi sealed track among the limestone spires. This is a one eerie place, especially at dawn and dusk when there’s no one around.

G’day Mate

From the dirty back lanes of Kuta to the fresh aired parks and tidy streets that belong to one of the most isolated city’s in the world…..The city of light’s.

The barrels and Landscape photos are coming thick and fast, although the photography has taken a back seat since the 0.0 tides kicked in on the Bukit peninsula. Racetracks is the name of the game with evenings being spent under the relentless crystal lips that pound down on the sharp reef lurking a few feet below the surface. If I had to mention one reason I keep coming back to Bali, for all of what it’s amazing for, the moments in these photos would be it. There is nothing better then getting shacked, whether it’s in home or foreign seas. What’s realistically about, on average, 3 to 5 seconds spent zooming through a barrel oddly seems like minutes within. Then after the session with all this tube time clocked up you just switch off to everything else around you and look vacantly into thin air replaying the moments back in your head. Sitting down to dinner with friends and trying to pull away from this uncontrollable daydream is hard work.

After landing on probably the world’s best runway (built in the minds of surfers wanting to check the surf ASAP) that belongs to Bali, the first objective was to cross over to Nusa Lembongan and what now seems our home from home, we just can’t get enough of it. It’s been 8 days now and I’m still trying to find a morning/evening to steal a scene from the seaweed farms of mount Agung. I know the volcanoes show themselves during these hours as I have some shots already. There’s always room for improvement though, especially with the files on my card. The mornings so far have proved difficult as there has been too much cloud cover, likewise in the evenings. This doesn’t mean I haven’t taken any photos at all within being here; I’ve been trying my hand at travel photography which is turning out to be pretty exciting stuff.

Yellow folks. After the gruelling task that was shaking off the comforts of Loog Choob, we are steadily going back to backpacker basics again. Krabi town, Ao Nang, Railey and Ko Lanta are the places we have been. Krabi town at first sight a few weeks ago seemed a ghost town and not worth hanging around for, but we keep coming back. The night markets are great. The Sunday gone was a big one, with every Tom, Dick and Harry getting involved. The photo below is the painted man; he just stands dead still at the entrance to the market and lets people paint whatever they want on him. He certainly pulls the crowd. The kids where loving it more than most painting on there names and doodling. One thing that struck me when watching/framing this was that if he did this in any western country, especially England, you can bet your last green queen that he would be covered in all sorts of rude wording and drawings. Not here though. I managed to get this shot with the people walking around him before I somehow stole his show and everyone started staring into my lens. Its funny what a big camera makes people do, usually they find there compacts and snap away next to me like I’ve struck oil or something. I noticed a few business cards where left in his box by restaurants that are based in Ao Nang, his future looks bright.

Bloody hell, we have been on the road a fair bit in Thailand and I’ve just managed to find some time to write an update while on the 14 hour bus trip back to Krabi from Bangkok. 14 hours is a long time, but these coaches are nothing like our English ones. They are really comfortable and the seats recline back a long way to get a good eye lid inspection. So we landed in Phuket which was not our cup of tea really. We booked in from Bali at some cheap beach huts in the north of the island, and it turned out they were in the middle of no where, which is nice if we knew about this in advanced. Lucky they had a restaurant on site which served the best red Thai curry yet, I'm keeping tabs on this. So two nights was had there eating, chilling and getting bitten to death by stupidly big mosquitos. There are some very deep craters in both our feet. Strong deet was brought soon after. It didn’t help that we was right next to a pond and the only blood source around.

Ahhhh Nusa Lembongan, an island east of Bali. Always a welcome break from the non-stop hassling street’s of Kuta. Roughly an hour by public boat from Sanur and your blessed with a quite 100% Hindu island with awesome waves and an amazing unqiue view of Bali. We arrived with the idea of staying at kutu losmen bungalows, as this has been a cheap home stay for the last few times we have visited. But after seeing what’s there now it looked and upon asking, definitely was out of our price range. 600,000rp a night compare to the usual 150,000rp it always was. Lembongan Made Inn on the other hand, was in our budget and what a bargain too. Four brand new, Java built, coconut wood apartments/huts within spitting distance of the lagoon, all for 150,000rp a night. (£10.50)

Ear infection, this was a whole new game to me, my suspicion of the hotel swimming pool being the main corporate for this quite frankly nasty swollen ear ache business was flushed down the drain when I took a copy of surfing lines and read an inside article on Kuta beach and its untreated sewage problems. I believe that most surfers that make the pilgrimage here know of this including myself. Yet still I seemed to think I would be alright and one of the few lines said to Kara was “I’ve never had a problem with it before, so I’ll be all right, right?”

Thunder, Snakes and Back Aches.

Imagine lying on a flat cut bed of slate (our mattress, that’s not a moan, that’s just an insightful fact) and to one side of you, bricks spaced apart running parallel but getting closer together as it reaches your head and the other side fitted with strobe lights. Now that bloody neighbour has decided to put his wheelie bins out at 2:00am (you know the ones) and in that typical “inconsiderate” fashion drags them over the bricks right next to your head. That’s pretty much the nights sleep we had just after I updated this the other week. This thunder was by no means inconsiderate, as I personally relish a good thunder storm (Sad but true) Kara wasn’t too keen for it this time and put sleep in front of the epic show. That was to date the loudest thunder I've ever heard, sod your Whitestone hill and south of France, Asia means business when it comes to thunder. The windows glass and doors were ratting all over the show. And the best thing was we were all completely helpless, there’s nothing you can do but watch\listen in complete awe or change you underwear. Immense!!!!

Well we have finally made it to Bali after the small hold up in London Heathrow. Can you believe the bloke at the Singapore check-in counter wanted to see printed proof of leaving Bali the 2nd time we are there (3 month away) even though we had connecting flights the other side, proof that we were leaving the 1st time and on top of that the confirmation e-mail for the 2nd time on my net book, all of this

Hello, Hope all is well.

A lot of you that have regularly seen me or Kara in person have more than likely been aware that over the past 4 years, we have been planning to bugger off on a trip for what will hopefully be a yearlong adventure. If we hadn’t been talking the hind legs off a donkey to you about it, then you’ve defiantly seen effects