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.