6 People 6 Months

Bananas hanging in the market This is our very last week traveling! We are counting down the days now to when we'll be back in New Zealand and onto familiar soil yet again. No more back packs! No more of the totally unknown and having to find our way around. We'll be back in the land of hot showers and flushing toilets too. But it does mean no more new and exciting sights and dinners out, No more fascinating wildlife or hot tropical days. These things I will be missing. Exquisite jungle flora At a huge 400-year-old tree in the jungle Indonesia has been full of surprises. The first being how friendly everyone here is! Maybe it's because we're western and fair-haired, but within our first minute of arriving in Medan people wanted to help us and everyone smiled and wanted to say hello and ask our names and to introduce themselves. We got a bus from Medan airport which took us through the city to the last stop, a huge mall, where Josh wanted to get a

Ao Nang beach This week we have been in Ao Nang. It is on the coast of Thailand's southern Krabi province. We rented through AirBnB a little two-roomed cottage which is about an hours walk from the beach. We've really enjoyed seeing a different side of Thailand this week. Aonang is a small town consisting of a main road and the beach front which has some fancy resort places and the more expensive touristy type shops. Right down the end of the beach near where the National Park begins there are rows and rows of huts that are set up for giving Thai massage (most of them for around $10-$20). The house we were living in was right up the top of the main road and down another, among rows of small houses occupied mostly by Westerners living there long term. It was nice and quiet there, with a view of a beautiful jungle clad hill not far away. And the nicest surprise about the place was that they had just recently put in a pool! We spent many happy hours luxuriating

From the train at dawn. Phoebe on the back of the truck Tuk-tuk we rode to Ao Nang. Our week in Bangkok was over, so it was time to say goodbye to our comfortable room and the street we had become happily familiar with, though I think we were all pretty keen to leave the city even though it wasn't all so foreign as it was in the beginning. Josh had one last visit to the dentist and we were very glad for this as the appointment came with a complementary drive to the train station which was about 2 hours away. We had tickets for the overnight train, a 12 hour trip through the night to Krabi, a coastal city. We were all dreading this trip and braced ourselves for a long night of discomfort in the cheapest seats we could find. We were allocated tiny seats meant to fit two people and positioned right next to the stinky toilet. But the good thing was that the train wasn't too full so we ended up being able to spread out a bit. Even so, the tiny seats weren't enough f

Bangkok's canal boats Every day we've gone a little further afield to discover a bit more of the sprawling city, though truthfully, I find the prospect of walking around in the stinky, fumy, crowded city rather daunting. But it's wrong to just see the city from our air-conditioned apartment windows, so we braved the heat and walked a few blocks to the river canal where we had an adventurous ride on a huge long boat.  The boat stopped at the pier for only about 20 seconds so we had to jump across the frothy brown liquid and down onto the boat to scrabble for a seat. The ticket collector on the outside of the boat carelessly collecting the fare.  There were two people collecting tickets that precariously walked around the outside edge of the boat holding only onto a flimsy rope. The locals hold out their fingers in an L shape to display how far they were travelling and hold out their 20 Baht notes. (Only about $1 NZ.) I don't know how the ticket collectors e