Why Are There SOOO Many Bugs???

I've been contending with my fair share of insects during the past 3 months. The ants in Asia had a real knack for finding our food bag and raiding our stash as well as crawling into every nook and cranny in my backpack, for what reason? No idea! There was no food in there so I assume it was just to annoy me and cause me the grief of having to shake out everything I own lest I put on clothes with ants inside. Not pleasant! I realize how minor these annoyances are now that we've arrived on the South Island of NZ. Let me tell you that the bugs here take things to a whole new level.

This is our first time dealing with sand flies, which are actually small black flies that are similar to mosquitos because they bite and suck blood. However they're far more resilient, often recovering from being swatted to come back and bite you again! Our campsite outside of Murchison was routinely covered in no less than 100 sand flies at any given point. We had to start spraying the mesh with bug spray because they somehow found ways in! But now that we've moved to Hokitika, we're contending with the usual sand flies but have upped the ante with hordes of mosquitos. The "mozzys," as our Aussie friends call them, are not quite as resilient as the sand flies but they're equally annoying and we're often shooing them away at all hours of the day, not just at dusk. I killed no less than 30 of them inside our tent last night! They can smell our CO2 and are super excited to come in and take a nibble. Its getting highly frustrating trying to keep the bugs at bay and has become a large part of my daily routine. Even though its warm during the day, I find myself wearing several layers to provide an extra barrier against bug bites and spend more time in the tent or in the car hiding from the bugs than I'd like to admit rather than enjoying the sunshine, nature and several of the beautiful hikes in the area. I had no idea New Zealand's South Island would be like this. If you come here, bring LOTS of bug spray!!

South Island And Kayak Adventures

I realize I haven't posted anything in forever...since we were on the North Island over a week ago. My bad. I also haven't uploaded any photos, and its starting to get ridiculous. Yesterday's count was well over 150 since my last upload. And lets just say we've seen and experienced a lot! Tongariro Crossing, Lord of the Rings film sites, Castlepoint, Wellington, the tiny town of Murchison where David began his South Island kayaking, and now Hokitika, the base camp of the serious kayak trips. David got in his first helicopter boating trip with a bunch of really cool Aussies yesterday and had a blast. The pilot was nice enough to take me up for a quick flight around the river bed too! First time in a helicopter and it was TOTALLY AWESOME! We're working on acquiring more photos and videos of yesterday from the Aussies and will do our best to post them ASAP. Sorry for being so quiet lately! Internet access is tough to come by when you're camping out all the time! Its even harder to post when you're racing the clock to try to get something writen before time runs out and the computer shuts down the internet access. Fingers crossed this goes through!! More soon! David's doing more kayaking tomorrow, so I'll have some free time....

Counter-Culture Shock

Coming to New Zealand has been a great experience so far. Its almost like a home away from home since its so Western compared to what we've been traveling through for the past 2.5 months. And while its great, its also a bit odd to be back in such a developed country. Dave has experienced this counter-culture shock on trips before but this is a first for me. I got so used to not being able to read signs or menus, speak much more than a handful of words in the language, calculate currency conversions in my head, concern myself over restroom conditions, carry my own toilet paper and hand sanitizer and ponder at what to eat that not having to do so anymore feels like we're cheating! Especially now that we've rented a car and eliminated the additional headache of figuring out bus and train schedules and worry about carrying heavy backpacks or shipping stuff home! Its meant that we can add luxury items like a cooler for all of our food and beer, camping gear to do things on the cheap, and of course, David's boat.

I can't believe what an odd feeling it is not to have to worry over our basic needs anymore. These daily concerns were ever-changing and required us to adapt quickly. It really became such a part of our existence that I almost feel a bit lazy for having more "stuff" (i.e. gifts) than I can fit into my backpack or carry comfortably by myself and a bit guilty for having toiletries that exceed 3.4 fluid ounces after being so limited for so long! Where are we going and how are we going to get there? Put gas in the car and consult the road atlas. Where are we going to eat? Grab something from the cooler. Or we can duck into a grocery store to buy things to cook on our camping stove. Where are we going to sleep? Doesn't matter, we have ground pads, sleeping bags, mosquito netting and a tent. We'll make it work. What if I have to pee? No worries, there are public restrooms with Western toilets, TP, soap and paper towels everywhere!

And we're back in an English-speaking country, so we can read signs (except our pronunciation of Maori words is AWFUL! Would you be able to pronounce the hill on the North island Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu without butchering it?) understand when people speak to us (even if the accents are a bit difficult sometimes) and we can absolutely be understood by those around us, which eliminates our previous ability to have rather private conversations in public without fear of being overheard. So even though we're still traveling, it doesn't feel like we're doing things much differently than we'd do if we were back Stateside. Its a bit of an odd existence to know that we're still 2 months from coming home, but in a way, we're already there. This whole experience has affected the idea of what my necessities actually are in a surprisingly profound way that I'm realizing I don't need nearly the amount of stuff not only to get by, but to be happy. Weird to me since I'm totally an American when it comes to consumer culture. Things are going to be different now....

Land of Kiwis, Sheep, Cows And The Biggest Ozone Hole On The Planet!

David and I arrived here in New Zealand yesterday afternoon at about 1:00 after an 11 hour flight. Despite only a 6 hour time change, we're having a really difficult time adjusting. Those overnight flights always kill me, though somehow Dave manages to catch several hours of solid sleep. I traded seats with him so that I sat in the middle and he had the aisle seat since he was going to be driving the rental car upon landing. Nothing like feeling like a zombie behind the wheel when you're driving on the left side of the road. Ever try to hug the wrong side of the road while sleepy? Doesn't work so well. David tagged a curb pretty hard on a round about and came close to swiping a few bumpers of parked cars before my screaming registered and he started to get the feel for things.

Things have been interesting during these last 24 hours Down Under. We're slowly getting over the jet lag and getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road. The landscape is absolutely gorgeous and its bright, sunny and warm all the time. Its light outside from 6am til 9pm, which is fantastic because the sun was setting at 6:45 in Thailand (which is great for "winter," but still....). There are more cows and sheep than I think I may have seen in my whole life. Milk is a HUGE thing here dairys and shops advertising milk are everywhere. There is so much to do and the people here are exceedingly nice, helpful and generous. My only complaint thus far is that the hole in the ozone above New Zealand is the largest in the entire world and the sun here feels like its scalding your skin even in the shade. For those who know, its like being on a glacier at 10,000 feet. People here wear sunscreen ALL THE TIME. You can wear 30 SPF and still get burned after only a few hours of exposure. Its really incredible.

We stayed in Tauranga last night with the sister of a guy Dave met while rafting in Colorado (he crashed on their couch for free for like 2 weeks). Christine and her husband Mike are wonderful and have volunteered their home for us to use as a base while we tour through the region. They're super awesome and we're going to totally take them up on it! Tonight we're back in Auckland staying with Jose, another boating friend of Dave's. No idea what's on the agenda for the next few days but we're going to spend some time tonight mapping it out over a few tasty beers. More to come!

Total Slacker

Okay, I know its been 10 days since my last post. I'm a total slacker when it comes to trying to keep this blog updated lately. But you should feel good about my attempts to update this thing since I haven't even caught up on my journal writing. Its January 3rd and I'm still trying to finish my notes on what happened in Cambodia on December 19th! I'm WAAY behind! And I can't promise it will be better any time soon.

David and I are flying out of Bangkok tonight on our way to Auckland, New Zealand. All I know is that we have a rental car waiting for us at the airport and we're going to try rounding up his boating gear and kayak at various friends' houses before heading back to Auckland to crash with some boating friends. From there, who knows? We're going to try to buy some camping gear like ground pads and either a tent or a tarp so that we can try to save some money by living out of the car/camping as much as possible. Will do my best to keep things updated, but I have very little idea of what to expect from our routine once we're in a new country. New Zealand is going to be centered very much around kayaking for Dave, since he humored me for 2 months following me around Asia and even extended our stay here, which cut into his boating. He's been such a trooper and I owe it to him to run shuttle at put-ins and take-outs for as many runs as he wants to descend for the next 7 weeks. Happy New Year, everyone!

Technical Glitch

Every computer I've managed to get ahold of in the last week has been used in an attempt to upload more photos to both Facebook and to my blog. I know there are plenty of people checking both sites to keep abreast of what's going on with my travels. I've been frustrated with Facebook being really "buggy" before and it taking multiple (I'm talking in the neighborhood of 100 tries in Beijing) attempts to upload all my photos. And I was trying to do the same in Siam Reap, although it seems the computer at our hotel had different plans for me. It seems to have added a virus to my camera's memory card. And while that has not stopped me from taking new photos, it has put the kibosh on me uploading ANYTHING. Which is exceedingly frustrating, as I took almost 300 photos of all the temples we visited around Angkor Wat. Not that I'd bore you with all of them, but its been a while since I was able to post anything. I managed a one-off post of me and David in front of Angkor Wat at sunset and it seems that will be the last photo I post until I get this issue resolved.

I know I have some "techie" friends out there who may be able to help me out. Here's what's happening. I browse for photos to upload on Facebook's photo album page and select the folder where my photos are being stored. Instead of going to the subfolder and then to all of my photos, it attempts to upload the DCIM.exe folder. The last few computers have given me a warning about a threat being found (Object - C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache\autorun.inf; Threat - Win32/Autorun.NAE virus). I can still see all my photos on the computer when I open the folder and on my camera in the review setting, I just can't do anything else with them. Any thoughts and help would be much appreciated!!

Fast Forward!

This is the part of the trip that feels like a blur and I'm tragically behind. We've seen two countries in 20 days and I'm having a hard time keeping up with things due to the pace and the lack of continual electricity in some of the places we've been staying. Don't get me wrong, its been relaxing to be off the grid, its just not helping my cause in trying to document what we've been up to. Mothers worry, so attempts must be made.

David and I took a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh on December 13 on a bus that went straight through the border. I'd heard all sorts of stories about scams you encounter where you buy a bus with continual service only to find out that you either have to change buses at the border and continue on with a new carrier or that the ticket you bought does not, in fact, go all the way through and instead leaves you at the border to fend for yourself. I was nervous about either scenario but we found a place the guaranteed the same bus throughout the trip so I felt pretty good about shelling out $10 each for a ticket. We had been unable to arrange a Cambodian visa before crossing the border so we were relying on our bus driver to make the necessary arrangements for us at the border, a prospect that made me nervous since we'd priced visa services around town and they were charging anywhere between $25 - $50 a pop for what should have been a $20 visa.

The border crossing issue was a completely foreign concept to me. Normally we walk through an orderly line and clear customs one at a time, like in the rest of Asia. But Vietnam and Cambodia are not necessarily the "rest of Asia." To leave Vietnam required handing over our departure cards long before we got our passport stamps. Before we got off the bus, the driver rounded up all the local's passports and handed them in one big bunch to the official stamping passports. Other bus drivers from other groups were doing the same. Which left enormous stacks of passports to be processed for the locals and which also left the foreigners to fend for themselves.

There was no such thing as a line, although it looked like it. What was actually happening was that people were standing around waiting for their names to be called because they had already handed over their passports. David and I figured this out after standing there, passports in hand, watching the whole process for several minutes. He had to find a bathroom and there were none in the immediate vicinity, which meant we had to get through that line somehow. I pushed my way past the 6 or 7 people in front of me (its Asia, that's what people do) and plopped both of our passports on the desk in front of the official. He looked at them and then pushed them off to the side and continued stamping local passports. Eventually, after several minutes, ours were processed too. From there, we got back on the bus and drove 100 yards to the Cambodian side of the border where we had to fork over our passports and pay our driver to handle our visas.

From there we got back on the bus and headed around the corner for lunch while we waited for the officials to process the stack of passports for everyone on the bus. This made me a little nervous--to be out of sight of my passport, the one thing that ensures I can continue my trip, for any real length of time. Sure, we've had to hand over our passports to hotels when we've checked in before, but they keep them locked away. But in this case, we were at the border, where it seems anything can happen. Thirty minutes later we were back on the bus, passports in hand. Things were fine.

We made it Phnom Penh and walked to our hostel. David let me navigate, which may not have been the wisest decision. I have terrific sense of direction most of the time but have left all the fine tuning of figuring out which streets to turn on to him. I got distracted and insisted that we had not made the correct turn, while David stood on the corner beckoning me to follow him because he knew where we were. Turns out he was right. Oops. Then I over-navigated us past the part of town we wanted to be in. Guess I'll leave that stuff to him in the future. One of the perks of dating a Boy Scout!

We only had one night in PP before heading to Sihanoukville, where we spent 3 blissful off-the-grid days at Otres Beach. We stayed in a place called La Casa, owned by a dude from Barcelona. Electricity only worked off solar power during the day (the only time you could charge camera, cell phone or computer batteries) and off generators at night. We stayed in a little grass thatched bungalow about 20 feet from the water, which had no fan and no toilet (there was a shared toilet behind our bungalow). We shared our bathroom (sink & cold water shower) with a family of the biggest cockroaches I've ever seen! And since the roof was ventilated where it joined with the walls, we also shared our digs with some loud croaking lizards, a jumping spider and a huge colony of ants (once they figured out where our food was). And even though David had to rig a system to keep our backpacks off the floor because I originally thought those squeaks I was hearing were rats, and even though we had to share space with so many creatures, this was one of my favorite places we've stayed!

We were fortunate enough to connect buses from Sihanoukville to Siem Reap through PP in one single day. Resulted in an early morning and LOTS of bus time. We were subjected to the horror of a karaoke bus. These things really exist--they have multiple television screens showing videos, a speaker system throughout the bus which is always turned to an unreasonable volume so that no amount of ear plugs or volume on the iPod will tune them out, and to make matters worse, there's a microphone that has a wire long enough to reach around the bus should anyone feel inspired enough to sing. Truly awful!! Luckily, no one sang, because I might have had to kill them.

And on the second bus from PP, the volume was low enough I could think. However, the A/C didn't seem to be working and I quickly overheated. We stopped at a rest area and I made David move out of the way so I could "Go dunk my head in a sink," which can often be a scary thought since there aren't always sinks. The toilets in Cambodia are often force-flush toilets and you're given a small bowl or cup inside a bucket or tub to pour water into the toilet to flush it. At this particular rest stop, there was no sink but I was fortunate enough to find a faucet in the tub instead of having to use the toilet bucket to pour on my head (although I was hot enough, I may have done it). We arrived in Siem Reap around sundown. We'd hoped to be able to catch a sunset at Angkor Wat, as we were supposed to arrive at 5:30 and didn't arrive until 7:00. Having been cooped up on a bus all day, we walked the 6k to our hostel to stretch our legs.

Siem Reap will have to be its own post, since this is getting out of control with length. Suffice to say, we're now in another new country (Thailand) and headed to the beach for the next 10 days, where I have no idea what the Internet situation will be like. Looks like I'm going to end up doing a lot of back-posting to try to do things justice. Sorry to keep you waiting! If I don't post again soon, Merry Christmas!