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Well, after a sabbatical from blogging for almost 2 years I am back online!!!

A bit has happened since I last posted from Australia in February 2008:

• I found a job working as a face-to-face fundraiser in Melbourne which I ended up doing for 8 months.  It took me all over Australia meeting so many amazing people and so many friends for life.  Fun times all round and so much beer consumed!
• I returned to Scotland for Christmas 2009 where I was met with a covering of snow after leaving soaring temps of 40 degrees in Melbourne.  A bit of hibernation ensued as I saw out the winter.
• Got a press pass for Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival in Beauly where I got a chance to do some more festival photographing.  An amazing campsite and neighbours made for a weekend to remember…
• Started my HNC in photography at Motherwell College and loving it so far.  Just finished the first block and now moving onto the more practical units of Portraiture, Still Life and Corporate photography.  Expecting the workload to get heavy shortly but at the moment enjoying a few weeks with a light workload which is giving me a chance to get the Christmas shopping blitzed!

So expect some more regular updates from here and lots more photos as my college course progresses and my skills increase!

Away now to admire the snow outside which is probably the earliest snow I have ever seen – about 2 inches last night, not sure if we are to expect more overnight…

Time for a quick update from Australia.

We arrived into Melbourne on the 21st of December just in time to spend an excellent Aussie Christmas with Denise, Simon and Daniel.

After chilling for a few weeks in Melbourne we hired a campervan and set off along the Great Ocean Road and then onto Adelaide. We managed to take in all the major tourist sights and also tick off sightings of all the famous Aussie animals in the wild.

We spent a few days in Adelaide before we set off on a 6 day tour to Alice Springs. We stopped off at some really cool places along the way including of course that big chunk of rock – Uluru. We did some really challenging hikes including an 8km hike up Dutchman’s Stern in the afternoon heat of 40 degrees so managed to finish up in Alice Springs a few pounds lighter!

We spent 2 nights in Alice Springs trying to cope with the soaring Northern Territory’s heat and then caught a flight over to Cairns to land in… rain!! We felt just a little bit at home but the warm temperatures soon got rid of those thoughts!

On the 30th of January it was time for another campervan hire, this time to make the journey down the East Coast to Sydney. Our first day was a bit of a disaster as we only managed to get 200kms down the road before being stuck for 2 nights in Cardwell due to flood waters blocking the road.

“Stuck in this tiny place in the rain for my birthday”, I thought. Thankfully the police woke us at 1am on the 1st and sent us on our way. We managed to get further down the road but to our dismay we were greeted with only more rain!

After a few days we finally managed to get away from the rain and we are now enjoying the “Sunshine State”. Our first major stop was Bundaberg where we visited the famous rum distillery and sampled a few drinks – before lunch was probably a bad idea so I had to get my stomach filled up with a delicious lunch in town. That evening we went to Mon Repos Conservation Park, a short 12km from Bundy to watch from nesting and hatching sea turtles. We were lucky enough to watch the rangers process a Loggerhead turtle nest that had hatched a few nights earlier where they found three baby turtles that hadn’t been strong enough to make it to the top, we sent them on their way to the sea to hopefully make it to adulthood and then we watched a group of Green Turtles make the race to the sea from the beach.

We visited Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo yesterday and watched an excellent animal show in the Crocoseum and we are now enjoying a lazy Sunday on the Southbank in Brisbane – similar in ways to London’s southbank with the exception of the beach!

Tomorrow we are heading for the Gold coast to some theme parks and some more sun!!!

I will upload photos as soon as I can…

We did a bit of a whistlestop tour through Vietnam covering from from Saigon to Hanoi in just 2 weeks.  We travelled by sleeping bus through the nights to maximise the amount of time we could have sightseeing.  The sleeping bus is essentially a bus with 3 lines of bunk beds, one at each window and one down the middle.  The bunks are fairly cosy and were just big enough for me to fit in but we discovered that the back row of the bus, which is 5 bunks side-by-side, gives you a bit more room so we managed to book onto them for each journey after the first.

We spent most of our time in Saigon learning about the Vietnam War – or the “American War” as it is called in Vietnam – and some of Vietnamese history.  We visited the Reunification Palace one afternoon which has been preserved in exactly how it looked in April 1975 when the north and south we re-unified.  We took a trip out to the Cu Chi tunnels which are a series of underground tunnels which the Vietnamese used during the war.  The tunnels are around 100km long linking various towns and villages in the Cu Chi area.  The Vietnamese used them to spring surprise attacks on the Americans and to enable them to get right into the middle of the American camps un-noticed.  They have widened a 100m section of the tunnels for visitors to experience what it was like.  The tunnels were very claustrophobic and hot and I almost did not make it to the first 20m exit point but once we got there I decided to soldier on.  There were parts where we had to drop ourselves down holes and then lift ourselves up again.  At one point we could only slide along on our bums!

Whilst we were in Siem Reap we visited the famous Angkor Wat temples.  We took a tuk-tuk trip from our hostel which took us around for 1 day visiting the “small tour” route.  The temples were really impressive and it’s amazing to think that they were built so long ago.

My personal favourite of the temples that we visited was Ta Phrom where nature has taken over and through the whole temple there are roots and trees growing everywhere.

We were pretty tired out from all our temple-hopping and climbing the steep temple steps that the next day we checked ourselves into the Golden Banana boutique hotel for a few days of luxury.  We treated ourselves to an hour long traditional Khmer massage that sorted out all those aches and pains and chilling by the pool in the hotel.  It was nice to treat ourselves to a few days luxury after a month of hard travelling!

From Siem Reap we took a bus down to Cambodia’s capital where we spent a few days visiting the Royal Palace (not really worth the visit in my opinion) and the S21 Toul Sleng museum and the killing fields just out of the city.  The museum is an old school that was turned into an interrogation centre and prison during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, from which prisoners were taken to the killing fields to be slaughtered.  It was really quite chilling to imagine what had gone on in these places and for it to be so recent as only 30 or so years ago.

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