Australia Part II: Sydney

After spending our first two days in Melbourne we took an overnight train from Melbourne to Sydney.  The trip took just under 12 hours and was a similar quality trip to riding Amtrak in the US.  The trip was almost entirely in the dark, so there wasn't much to see along the way.

We arrived in Sydney around 7 AM.  Sydney is located on a beautiful natural harbour (yes, that's how they spell it in Australia).  After stashing our luggage in a locker at the train station we headed out to explore the city.  We saw the Sydney Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, and Circular Quay.  For lunch we met up with my brother in law's sister, Kim, who lives in Sydney.

After lunch we picked up our luggage and headed out to Bondi Beach where we spent two nights in an apartment booked through Air B&B.  Our B&B hosts Steph and Ed were great.  They are expats from France and had a unique perspective on living overseas that we could appreciate.  They also live right by one of Sydney's most popular beaches with some great views.  Bondi is a great surfing beach.  While we don't surf ourselves (yet), it was fun to watch people riding the waves.

Steph and Ed also let us use the barbecue (grill) on their porch.  We took full advantage of this and enjoyed some delicious steak, potatoes, and green beans.

For our second day in Sydney we found our way back to the city center by bus and then hopped on a ferry out to Manly.  Bondi is south of Sydney Harbour while Manly is to the north.  The ferry to Manly offered great views of the city, and Manly is rather picturesque itself.  It is located on an isthmus between a bay off the Sydney Harbor and the shore of the Pacific Ocean.  

For lunch in Manly we enjoyed fish and chips and some local beer at the 4 Pines Brew Pub across from the wharf.

After lunch we ventured out on a walk around the harbour in Manly.  The harbour view was nice, but the local flowers and birds were definitely the highlight of the four hour walk.

Some of our favorite birds were a sulphur crested cockatoo, Australian pelicans, a little pied cormorant, and numerous rainbow lorikeets. Also notable were the spiders the size of my hand hanging out in the trees above us.

We waited until dusk to head back in to the city and enjoyed the blue hour view of Sydney Harbour.  Upon our arrival back in Sydney we managed to meet up for drinks with a high school friend (Jeff Mills) who was in town for work.  It's fun running into familiar faces all over the globe.

Our last morning in Sydney was spent taking a bus, a train, and another bus out to an industrial neighborhood where we picked up our camper van.  We saved the best part of our trip for last.  Six days of camping along the coast between Sydney and Melbourne was amazing.  I'll share details soon in my next blog post.

Australia Part 1: Melbourne

We're back from 11 wonderful days in Australia!

• We flew into Melbourne where we spent our first two days.
• Next we took an overnight train to Sydney and spent two days there.
• Leaving Sydney we rented a camper van and spent the next six days making our way down the coast back to Melbourne, seeing beaches, seaside towns, national parks, and wildlife along the way.
• We had one more final night in Melbourne before heading back to Thailand.

This blog installment will focus on our beginning and ending time in Melbourne, and I'll post more later about Sydney and the camper van.

Traveling to Australia from Thailand is much quicker than from the U.S., but it's still a long trip.  Total flying time was about 10 hours, plus a layover in the middle.  We flew with Royal Brunei airline connecting through Bandar Seri Begawan in the tiny oil rich country of Brunei.  It was an interesting place to connect through.  The country is about twice the size of Rhode Island and has a population of just over 400,000.  The airport was tiny.  It felt like a small airport in the midwest United States.  The airline was nice though, and the price was much less than any of the direct flights from Bangkok to Australia.

Melbourne is a large modern city.  The city is relatively young at only about 160 years old, but still has a great historic charm.  The architecture is clearly inspired by its British origins, and the city feels quite European.  Public transit is excellent, with trams and suburban trains blanketing the city.

We arrived in Melbourne at 5 AM on Sunday morning.  We stayed with friends of ours that used to live in Bangkok.  We spent much of Sunday catching up with them and getting a short tour of the city.  In the evening we hopped on the train to central Melbourne to catch an Australian rules football game at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.  "Footy" is a sport that is rather unique to Australia. I won't explain all the rules, but basically teams score points by kicking "goals" similar to a field goal in American football.  The game is played on a modified cricket field, the ball looks similar to an American football, play really doesn't ever stop, and no pads are worn.  The game we watched was between two Melbourne area teams, Essendon and Carlton.  Essendon won by a huge margin, but it was still tons of fun to watch.

On Monday Mary and I did a bit of exploring by taking the train into the city center and renting bikes.  It is autumn in Australia and the weather was very comfortable for biking around the city.  In the evening we headed to Southern Cross railway station to catch the overnight train to Sydney.

A week later we arrived back in Melbourne after visiting Sydney and camping along the coast,

We chose to stay in the city this time in part because our friends were traveling (to Thailand).  They offered to let us stay at their house even though they were away, but we thought it would be nice to stay in the city center for a night.

We booked a room through Air B&B in a nice condo building in the "docklands" district of Melbourne adjacent to the central business district.  This was much cheaper than a hotel and offered great views of the city.  We spent the evening walking around central Melbourne and enjoyed a nice dinner along the riverfront. 

The pictures below show the view from our room, the riverfront area where we had dinner, one of Melbourne's many trams, and beautiful Flinders Street Station which serves as a rail hub for suburban trains.

Overall we loved Melbourne, but Sydney an camping were amazing too.  I'll update more on the rest of our trip over the next few days.

Break Time

Mary and I have both been extremely busy with work and Mary with grad school the last few weeks, so our lives haven't been all that exciting (unless you think conference calls are exciting).

A few interesting news tidbits from Bangkok.
1.  Bruno Mars was recently here for a concert.  I wouldn't have even known this except for a picture that went viral on social media of him purchasing a pirated copy of his own CD in a popular tourist area.  The pirated music dealer has since been arrested, probably mostly due to embarrassing Thailand rather than for selling illegal copies of CD's.

2. Not many people know this, but Bangkok was heavily bombed during World War II by the allied forces.  It's not uncommon for construction projects to uncover un-exploded bombs from this era.  A number of bombs turned up this week.  One was sold to a local scrap yard.  Workers proceeded to try and cut up the relic with a torch, not realizing it was still a live 500 pound bomb.  The result was 9 dead and much of a neighborhood leveled.  There was also a 750 pound bomb found in the pond of an industrial estate this week.

Thailand's largest holiday, Songkran, is just around the corner and Mary's is off from school for the next week and a half.  I'm taking some vacation and in a few hours we will be on our way to Australia!  We're going to see Melbourne, Sydney, and spend 5 days exploring beaches and national parks in a rented camper van.  We're not sure what our internet situation will be, but we hope to be able to provide a few updates along the way.

Visitor

I've posted a lot on the protests here recently.  They're still going on, it's dangerous sometimes, blah, blah, blah.  Enough said.

We had a great weekend in Bangkok!

My former college room mate was in Bangkok this weekend for work.  This is what we love about Bangkok.  Even though we are half a world away from friends and family, we get more random visitors here than we ever did in Minnesota or Wisconsin.  We had dinner with a high school friend just a few weekends ago, and now we just got to spend a weekend with a great friend of mine from college.  It was wonderful.  And yes, Lawren is still better at Settlers of Catan than me (or Mary).

This morning I got up early and took the subway up to Bang Sue to get a few pictures of a steam train excursion to Ayutthaya to celebrate the 117th anniversary of the State Railway of Thailand.  Although I would have enjoyed taking the train, we had other things to do today.  I was still able to snag a few pictures early in the morning.  If you want to see grown men behaving like little children on Christmas morning, go watch a steam train.  This applies to every country in which I have ever seen a steam train.

The early morning steam train worked out well, and I was home in time to find Mary getting out of bed.  We had plenty of time to get ready for morning church.  We typically attend church in the evening, but Mary had plans to work on a group project for grad school tonight, so morning church it was.  We were glad we attended, as we discovered it was the last week one of our friends would be in church before moving.  Beatrice is a refugee from the Congo.  She has been granted UN refugee status and is moving to Toronto next week.  We're sad to see her go, but also very excited for her!

Saint Pat's Day

Mary and I headed out for a Guinness and pub food on Monday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.  We opted for Molly Malone's on Soi Convent in the Silom neighborhood.  It was the first time we've been to this neighborhood in months due to protests nearby.  We were reminded of three years ago when we went out to a different Irish pub in the same area with Mary's Dad when he visited us here over St Paddy's.  I recall that day clearly as it was one of the coolest we've experienced in Bangkok.  If my memory is correct, the high that day was 63 F.  This year was more typical.  It was in the upper 80's in the morning and was still over 100 F at supper time.  Summer has arrived.

Here I am waiting for my beef and guiness pie.  Mary enjoyed fish and chips.

We didn't stay out late as the area around Lumpini Park continues to be a danger zone for protest related violence.  This particular pub is a 10 minute walk from he park and is not in a dangerous spot, but the subway station we go through to get home is right across the street from the park entrance where the main protest stage is still set up.  The political violence here has decreased significantly in the last two weeks since the protests were consolidated to Lumpini Park, but there are still reports of shootings and grenades late at night around the park.  It's still best to avoid the park and adjacent streets, especially after dark.

This coming weekend we are looking forward to spending some time with one of my college room mates who will be in Bangkok for work.  Hard to believe it's been almost 8 years since graduation!

The Evolving Protest

Mary was happy to see the Asok intersection near her school completely clear of protesters today.  This is the first time the intersection has been fully opened for traffic in almost two months.  Mary gets off the subway here each day and walks about ten minutes to her school.  You can also see our condo building on the skyline at the top near the center of the picture.  (Picture from twitter @quandrew).

This is what things looked like at the Asok intersection a few weeks ago.

With the protests moved to Lumpini Park just down the street from us, a number of new military security checkpoints have appeared, including one right next to the entrance to our condo.

Only one minor incident reported today.  Two grenades were thrown outside the criminal court on the north side of central Bangkok.  Only one exploded and nobody was injured.

Petchaburi

Bangkok is a fun city to live in, but sometimes it seems the best part is how easy it is to get out of the city to beautiful mountains, beaches, and jungles.

This weekend we drove about 3 hours outside of Bangkok to Petchaburi province with some of my Thai and US coworkers.  We stayed at a resort along the Petchaburi river, went rafting down the river, swimming, and enjoyed a beautiful sunset at the edge of Kaeng Krachang National Park.  We even sang a little Karaoke at night.  An all around good time.

A brief update on the continuing political unrest here:
There have been a number of violent attacks over the last week at anti government protests in Bangkok, including a grenade attack that killed two young children last Sunday.  The children were leaving a grocery store with their father and had nothing to do with the protests.  There was also quite a bit of fighting on Tuesday night just down our street (Rama IV) near the Lumpini protest sight.  A number of people were injured by grenades and gunfire, but nobody was killed.

Starting today, all the protest sites in central Bangkok are consolidating into a single site at Lumpini Park.  This should help traffic patterns return to normal, and we're thankful that Mary will no longer pass by a protest site on here way to and from work each day.  We will be keeping a close watch on how things go at Lumpini though as this is only a 10 minute walk from our condo.