Bye bye Australia...

hello New Zealand. hello newlook, pithy blog entries. Flew in yesterday morning. Swapped searing heat, water shortage and sunburn for brooding sky and a night of storms. Auckland is a funny place with barely anyone on the streets and itäs riddled with volcanoes - have been assured Mum that they are not active. Tomorrow we take possesion of our spaceship - a people carrier with mattress in the back masquerading as a camper van - and head to the Northlands to see the beaches and the most northerly point of the land, Cape Reinga. We've stocked up on CDs so I can sing us all the way there (oh Dan, you lucky thing) and have even got a few DVDs to stave off the movie cravings not satisfied by a trip to see ridiculous, misanthropic Babel this afternoon (although we did find a House of the Dead games machine in the multiplex and spent a happy five mins shooting zombies until we were both eaten). See you the on the other side....

Happy Xmas posting

Think something's gone wrong here and the Xmas posting got lost. Back up on the site now. I know it's a bit late, but if you want to read my slightly tipsy Boxing Day message, then it's a few posts back. Called Happy Christmas.

to make this post a little more interesting, here are some photos and eventually, a link to the site where more photos are stashed.

this is a random picture of the restaurant at the guesthouse in Mui Ne in Vietnam where we stayed the week before Christmas. Forgot to take Xmas tree photo on Ko Tao.

This is another photo of us on beach on Boxing day (a few hours before cocktails at Whitening - very good daiquiris), just to give you an idea of the kind of Xmas we had. we're in silhouette (how do you spell this word, is it like cacaouette?), mercifully, so you can't see too much of me in my tiny Khao San Rd bikini. You can see the warm, clear sea behind where we had our Boxing Day swim



and this is a photo of danny just minutes before we got on the boat to take us back to the mainland. one worried man:



if you haven't seen our photo site, go to www.dether.com and follow the link to the flickr site.

Happy New Year

New Year's Eve

Arrived safely in Sydney and spent New Year's Eve with Dan's beautiful sister in Manly. Here we are just before midnight, full of wine, cocktails wishing everyone a Happy New Year. The New Year Fireworks are just about to explode all over the city and Dan and I are just about to realise that Sydney is famous for its fireworks, something that had escaped us entirely, there not being a movie about the subject or anything. It will take me another two weeks to realise why they make such a fuss about New Year here. Although I am bright enough to know that new year will hit me before it hits mum and dad, affecting the timing of my yearly NYE telephone call, I am too dim to realise it will hit me and Sydney before most of the world - hence the enormous expense for son et lumiere and thus making it the most conceptually significant New Year I will see in for some time. I missed this fact entirely. We also missed Manly's fireworks - too busy talking and drinking champagne in Rachel's clifftop flat. We watched the big midnight event on a tiny television screen at a house party the other side of Manly Beach, so technically, missed them too. Fireworks are not my thing, so I wasn't overly disappointed. It was my first hot New Year's Eve, and my first upside down New Year's Eve. I didn't miss the sub-zero tramp home through litter-strewn South London, the taxi-rank scrum, or the greyness of a hungover British New Year's Day.

We spent much of our first few weeks in Australia in Manly. Manly's called Manly, allegedly, because of all the big blokes that were found there when the colonialists first arrived. You have to suck your stomach in just to walk to the corner shop, so contemporary Manly men are continuing the beefcake tradition. It's near Shelly beach, so called because of all the shells found there. I thought that as there is a Byron up the NSW coast and a Bronte in East Sydney that the Australians were a very literary bunch - Shelly Beach was a living ode to the poet. But it seems the person who discovered Shelly all those years ago was a straightforward type and he no doubt got to the beach long before the poet Shelly donned his frilly shirt and pulled out his quill. I can't be sure. My Australian history is shoddy despite hours spent at the Museum of Sydney.

Anyway, this pragmatic namer of places set the tone for the nation. No time to hang around inventing fancy names for things, make it clear make it brief and she'll be right. It also follows that all other important words and names shall be short, with the exception of those that end in and o or a y sound (Danno, Franno, tinny, dunny, barbie). There are signs preparing you for this linguistic peculiarity at the airport. When I arrived this made me bridle, as if I had any right to be precious about the English language; I'm brutalising it as a type with bad spelling and grammar and awkward phrasing. Snobs law. Of course, these signs are supposed to be funny, even unfunny me saw that eventually. It would be patronising to call this simplicity refreshing and it would be a lie as it's not as if I was finely tuned in to the linguistic peculiarities of Vietnam or Cambodia. It was all I could manage to learn hello, thank you and that's delicious - and I've a degree in languages. It's just that this familiarity with the language seems quintessentially Australian. We watched Kenny tonight, a big Australian cinema hit about a man who works for a portaloo company. Kenny speaks with such colourful phrases - broad and vivid and precisely the kind of free, plain-speaking this particular snob never learns in any language. It took me ages to learn the good bad words in French and Italian. This is probably why I can never remember jokes either. (Small aside: Kenny is a great film. Funny and touching and lots of poo jokes. Even I laughed).

Back to my simplicity rant. Just down the coast from Manly is North Head, the northerly spit of land that forms part of the entrance to Sydney Harbour. In Sydney Harbour, you'll find the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge, aka the coat hanger, which is currently illuminated by a coat hanger-shaped light display at night. It's the bridge's diamond jubilee, and so the coathanger display segues into another display in the shape of ... a diamond. It's a useless installation that undermines the city's reputation for light extravaganzas, as evidenced by the world's best firework display on NYE, but it's rather apt. Australia is a straighforward place, a Ronseal place. And consequently - Lawrence and Mum, you've been v perceptive - maybe not a place that inspires too much in the way of blogging. Not anyway, in someone who tends to blog like a diary and is most verbose when things are less rosy. Life is so laid back here, there's no need to reflect too much on what you see and do, you just do it.



What Sydney has that's worth writing home about


(I look v goofy in this pic but don't the Es look a handsome bunch?)

There's sun, good food and an abundance of healthy people, (many of whom insist on maintaining fitness in the midday sun which is extemely tiring to witness), some intriguing art deco architecture and more importantly, some wonderful human reminders of home. This is how Sydey has distinguished itself so far, as the place where we got back in touch with family and friends. It's been especially fun to wander round this ostensibly foreign city and meet good people from back home. Most of Dan's family is here (with notable and missed expeptions - and another big Hortop-shaped gap), a good proportion of Winchester ( we bumped into some friends of Dan's ma and Pa just the day before yesterday), and it was amazing to run into my wonderful friend Laura in the middle of a sunny Sydney street last week after all those years of chattering in Development's kitchen or in the Research Office at the NHM.

We've spent some lovely days with Rach walking the coast, and have had some gargantuan discussions with her which will fuel a lot of thinking over the coming months. We met up with Nicola and Ivan, last seen in the back garden of our old house in Tulse Hill on Dan's 30th birthday. We've had several happy Etherington days fuelled by wine and good food and the odd museum fix. Dan's Mum and Dad have been so generous, and deserve special mention in the blog, not only putting us up at the Shangri La - well beyond our usual hotel standards - but also feeding us up after all that terrible starvation in Asia, and, perhaps most graciously, looking on politiely when we reach for the digitial camera for the umpteenth time to illustrate another traveller's tale. (Thanks to my Mum and Dad for the second night in Shangri-la which we used wisely, staying up late to watch Father Ted on UKTV and stockpiling complimentary toiletries for the ongoing journey). The view from our room in the Shangri la looked like this. 27th floor. I tried not to think of Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno.



We're now staying with Laura, who has given us the most amazing welcome, allowing us to commandeer her beautiful home, her cooker (in exchange for a white chocolate and banana cake and a chocolate mousse), her washing machine, her computer, and her (or rather her husband Ed's) games consoles. Dan's presently luxuriating in front of a large television, making a huge racket and you'd honestly think he'd just discovered America or something, such is his excitement. This alone represents unbelievable kindness and I think Laura has a cheerleader for life now in Dan.

Best I stop this entry before I get too tired and emotional - have noticed a preponderance of breathy, upbeat adjectives - very jolly for me, not too fascinating for you. One side effect of all this warmth and connection is that it's induced a lot of thinking about home which could easily lead to a huge bout of homesickness if not kept in check, and again, not good reading for all those back at home who may or may not wish to be given leave to do what they please for 8 months. Felt a bit gloomy the day before yesterday - somewhat inexplicably as it was sunny, we were off to see some video art at the Museum of Contemporary art, and I'd just eaten Dan's body weight in cooked breakfast. It's perverse that seeing everyone here reminds you that you'll be off on your own again soon - so much for carpe diem, although arguably, this whole trip is a huge excercise in carpe diem. You think you can handle 8 months gadding about, being spontaneous, seeing new things every day, with only your Dick Whittington at North Face stick and hanky, and your long-legged sidekick for company, but sometimes you just want to be at home, in a pub with friends, on the sofa with Mum or in bed with two furry, purring beast who don't know the meaning of a lie-in. I'm not so gloomy now. In a few minutes, we're going to walk round Lavender Bay, across the Harbour Bridge into a gleaming city with no other purpose than to be open-eyed, open-minded - if I can prise Dan away from the X-Box.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I found The Shining so frightening when I first saw it that it made me jump up and down on the arm of the sofa. I couldn't sit still to watch it, couldn't look, had to look, couldn't listen. Nicholson's axe splintering the bathroom door; the sound of the son's tricycle in the hotel's coridoors, rolling on wood, then rug, then wood; the snow storm and the chase through the maze; the freaky girl twins in their matching frocks at the top of the stairs, The Overlook Hotel, isolated, grand and sick at heart, the source and guardian of all the misery that Jack unlocks as he tries to write his novel.

Imagine how spooky, then, to find yourself sleeping in The Overlook Hotel. Not the original, that's in Colorado, but a similarly grand and isolated place on the edge of the massive Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains. A friend of Rachel's, a lovely, tipsy girl called Lauren, had raved about the place on New Year's Eve, and shown a picture of its belle epoque lounge. After weeks of low rent guesthouses with their bedbugs, condemned air conditioning units and dust drifts under the bed, this posh hotel called to us. All work and no play makes Dan and Fran a dull boy and girl. We'll skip the obvious inappropriateness of this quote for our situation and cut to the underlying message which is: Live a little! Spend your precious pennies on a night at the Grand Mercure Hydro Electric! Lastminute.com sealed the deal. We got three nights with breakfast for a bargain 180 pounds. how easily you adjust to suit your wants. 180 would get us ten night accomodation in Asia, at the very least.

So this is how we came to be wandering the near-empty corridors of the Hydro Majestic, perched on the edge of a great chasm of forest and bush. We took pictures of the spooky bath chairs, remnants of the hotel's spa past.
We played pool in the deserted lounge, laughter echoing, Fran losing, Dan winning and texting at the same time. We looked over the crumbling hotel balustrades into the forest and thought of the bush fires that tore through the area several years ago, and that were tearing through forest only a few kilometres up the road a few weeks before our visit. We had high tea in a neat parlour, where all the guests whispered to one another, afraid to break the rather atmostpheric silence that accompanied the stunning blue views. We shook along with everyone and everything else when the train came through the town, blowing its horn to scare beasts of the imagination off the tracks. We thought of all the scary movies this place brought to mind, and tried not to think of them when we turned the lights off at night. It was shabby, you couldn't get a beer in the bar after 8.30pm as all the staff had gone home, and much of the building was closed, but it was a place full of character. Hard to find in these parts, it seems, where every other guesthouse in Katoomba resembles The Bates Motel. Not sure my love of movies could induce me to spend the night in one of these places.