Lina's 30th Birthday

Message from Lina: Whatever you want to call it - "Dirty Thirty", "The Big 3-0", "The New Twenty" - I have entered my fourth decade of life. Today, I am 30. I need to be congratulated for making it this far, and in mostly one piece ("Congratulations Lina!"). I blinked my eyes and somehow, those years called my twenties, are gone. What a totally crazy decade. Despite all my mistakes and thinking I knew everything when I pretty much knew nothing, I have a memory bank the size of an iPod storage space full of stupid and funny stories. I have no regrets and that's the way I will live my 30s. What better way to start the first year of this decade and marriage, by travelling the world with my husband and making my dreams come true. This is a photo of me at Kumamoto Castle where we spent my birthday. To everyone who has shared my 20s with me, thankyou. Cheers to more mistakes, more funny stories, more magic to be created and more Moet & Chandon. Happy Birthday to me.

Country life

Life on the farm is simple and happy. We laugh everyday, get to know people over extended meal times at the long wooden kitchen table, eat ice cream for afternoon tea and Lina sleeps under a tree at lunch. As we work, the farmers whistle, we think about life, the women chat in Japanese, the frogs croak, the dog that doesn't like English follows us around and we play our small role in creating organic vegetables for people to eat. This is a photo of some pots and things in the yard with a greenhouse in the background. It was taken at about 5pm after we harvested vegetables to be sold the next day. The kitchen utensils and other objects in this shot are typical of the things lying around the farm that represent simplicity and comfort living. We love the orange sky because it means the day has nearly come to an end, we feel a strong sense of accomplishment for another day's work and dinner is just a couple of hours away. Everything here is so easy and makes perfect sense.

City slickers hit the farm

We're on a farm in South Japan. A real farm with rabbits, a tractor, pick forks, hay and greenhouses. There's a 19 year old dog, a Christmas tree, a volcano, two cats that spoon each other, a dog that doesn't like us speaking English, cob webs on glass jars in the kitchen and a brown snake that bit one of the farmers 5 ago (actually, we don't know if the snake is still here). We eat around a big country kitchen table 3 times a day, pull out weeds, feed the cows, sow seeds, harvest crops and pack organic vegetables for sale. This is just perfect for us city-slickers for the next couple of months.

Nice Japanese girls

With a population of about 30 million, Tokyo is full of sub-cultures. You can see the sub-groups on the weekend at Harajuku and Yoyogi Park. The young gothics dress up like the girls in this photo. They have a freaky issue with damaged body parts. A lot of them wear bandages across their noses like the girl second to the left. We saw some with eye patches and one girl who painted an injured, bloody eye on herself. If you're a keen people watcher, Harajuku to you would be like a candy store to a kid.

Cherry snowflakes in season

We're in Japan during the one week (or week and a half) of the year when the cherry blossoms bloom. Blowing in the wind, the petals fall from the trees like pink snow flakes and form a snow bed of cherry flowers. We're in Nikko, a town just a couple of hours north of Tokyo. In two days, we walked for a total of 10 hours exploring the brightly painted shrines and woodlands. The Lonely Planet guide says this town can get extremely crowded, but we found spots where we felt like we were the only people in existence. Just the feeling we were looking for when getting away from the big smoke of Tokyo for a couple of days.

Welcome to Japan!!

We only flew 4 hours from Hanoi to Tokyo but we feel like we're in a totally different world. Where are the men urinating on the street? Where are the dead rats? Why isn't anyone offering Dean drugs? Why isn't anyone trying to sell us crap we don't want or need? Why aren't people pushing us over to get on a public bus? Simple answer: We're in Japan now where cleanliness is a virtue, impeccable presentation is a moral standard and politeness is probably taught to the Japanese in utero. Everything here is over-packaged in the name of aesthetics, our cleaner THANKED US for letting him clean our hotel room and the airport bus baggage handlers lined up and bowed to us as the bus departed!! We had gotten used to Vietnamese directness, pragmatics and "snooze or lose" mentality of daily survival. We're not sure how Vietnam and Japan can even be in the same continent when we feel like we've entered a parallel universe.

My Vietnam

WOW - What a chapter!!! Today is our last day in Vietnam after living here for nearly 3 months. So many more memories, tears, experiences and human connections added to our lives. The highlights: Watching two blind people support each other across 12 lanes of hectic Saigon traffic; A H'Mong hill tribe girl offering a buffalo in return for Lina marrying her brother; A child drawing a goatee on himself with black texta to be like Dean; Dean being told he has a son in Hanoi; Eating pho bo to cure our hangovers; Lina improving her Vietnamese language skills to a confident and advanced level; Meeting our World Vision sponsor child; Dean appearing in a Vietnamese newspaper article for the work he did re-building homes; and not least: all the volunteer work we've done (to name a few!). It has all been amazing.

World Vision visit

We flew from Hanoi to Vietnam's 4th biggest city, Danang. From there, we drove for 3 hours to a town called Tra Bong to visit our Vietnamese World Vision sponsor child. He looks exactly as he does in the World Vision photo and we recognised him straight away. It was great to meet him, his brother and mum. This is a photo of a preschool/kindergarten that was built in April 2007 and funded by World Vision. You can see that the front yard is still under construction. It's being made into a playground. You can just imagine how cute all the children were. They were so gorgeous! Two of them did solo singing performances and the whole class recited a poem about traffic lights for us. On her knees, Lina went around to greet all 33 of them and shook their tiny little hands. We can't wait to meet two of our World Vision kids in South America later this year.

Fishing to survive

Some of the children we teach live on the Red River in Hanoi. Dean helped to re-build some of the families' homes as they need replacing every 3-4 years. The villagers have recently drained the water from the river with a pump. They do this to catch the fish and sell them. This is a photo of villagers pulling in a fishing net.

How long is Ha Long?

If you're ever in North Vietnam, your trip won't be complete if you don't visit Ha Long Bay. It is one of the world's natural wonders, with over a thousand limestone formations and we don't know how many islands. If you go to the cave, look out for the big red penis. We went here for a weekend trip away from the hustle and bustle of Hanoi. After sleeping on the floor for over a month, the highlight of Lina's trip was snuggling up in a bed, with a fluffy warm blanket, on board the junk boat cabin. Ahhhh, bed and blanket. The things we miss.

Vietnam traffic and scooters

Dean took this photo when he was on the back of a scooter. The traffic in this shot is pretty quiet for Hanoi. Compulsory helmets have only been required by law in the last few months. Being such a new concept, a lot of Vietnamese people wear helmets that don't fit or are otherwise inappropriate. That's because they don't wear them for safety reasons; they wear them so they don't get fined. As in this photo, it's not unusual to see children without helmets. Most of the time, traffic is totally hectic and the way to cross the road is to literally walk in front of oncoming vehicles - scooters, cars, buses and trucks. In Saigon, we've seen the elderly, the blind and disabled walk across streets with 5-6 lanes of traffic. Crazy? Or ordered chaos?

Community on the Hanoi Red River

This is the home of two girls we teach. They live in a small community on the Hanoi Red River. The families do not have any property rights to the land, so they have built houses on the water. The homes need replacing every 3-4 years due to the poor quality building materials. Before we entered the home, the Vietnamese worker politely asked whether the house would collapse with all four of us in there. When the mother said it would be okay, we walked along the small plank of wood connecting the house to the land. Inside, we sat in the only room of the house, in which both parents and the two sisters sleep. The toilet is a hole in the floor and human waste is disposed of in the river. The house is about 4 metres by 2.5 metres, the size of a typcial Australian bathroom. The mother spoke to the worker about her housing and financial difficulties and they discussed how our organisation could assist with repairs to her home.

Working with kids in Hanoi

We've started our volunteer placement in Hanoi, Vietnam teaching English to a group of children from some of the most disadvantaged parts of this city. The children in the photo all look about 10-12 years old, but they are actually all between 12-16. Small physical stature is just one of the many effects of undernutrition. One of the children in this photo works from 10pm - 7am and comes to our class without having slept. Another child doesn't always come to class because she has to collect rubbish for which she earns about 70 Australian cents a day. The children come to our school for reasons such as not being able to afford schooling or not being able to enrol into mainstream school due to not having identifying information. Some of the children's births have not been registered or their families are illegal immigrants from rural areas. The work has been challenging and the kids are pretty cool. We have five more weeks here.

Tet celebrations

We spent the Vietnamese Lunar New Year's Day (Tet)in Saigon and tagged along with Lina's uncle to a family feast. All the men and women helped prepare the New Year's lunch, which included eel, wild boar, curry and Vietnamese pizza (you'll have to ask us what that is if you don't know). In typical Vietnamese fashion, these two elderly women quietly watched from a distance as the men (and Lina) ate and drank. One of the women lives in the house where we had the party.

Vietnamese Tet

We were lucky to spend Vietnamese New Year (Tet) in Saigon with Lina's uncle and his family. If you have been to Saigon, you would know the hustle, bustle and organised chaos of the city. Imagine the city usually, but on caffeine. That is the atmosphere of Saigon preparing for Tet. The South Vietnamese Tet flower is called hoa mai (in the North, the Tet flower is pink and called hoa dao). This photo of a hoa mai tree, bearing a "Happy New Year" banner in lucky red, was taken at the Saigon Tet flower market.

Cambodia's recent past

We knew nearly nothing about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975-1979 until we arrived in the nation's capital, Phnom Penh. We learnt about the genocide of nearly 2 million people and the forced labor camps. Visiting Phnom Penh has been the most depressing part of our trip so far which included a visit to Tuol Sleng ("S-21") Prison. At S-21, people were arrested for fictitious treason offences, tortured and forced to admit to crimes they didn't commit. This is a photo taken by Dean of one of the many prison cells. You can see an ammunition crate toilet, a dinner plate and the chain that was used to hold down a prisoner's legs. We were there for two hours. Lina refused to actually enter the prison cells and waited for Dean in the courtyard the whole time. After this, we visited what is now known as "The Killing Fields", where prisoners were executed. We had to finish the day with a few drinks.

Angkor, Cambodia

Angkor is an ancient Camobidan city, with temples and other buildings over 1000 years old. We spent three days in Angkor, mystified by the temples and especially by Angkor Wat, the most well-known and well-preserved of them all. We watched the sun rise and set against Angkor's backdrop. There is something very special about watching the sunset fall away behind such history, then watching it rise to greet the world again the next morning. This is a photo of the sunset.

Luang Prabang by Night

People work at all times of the night in South East Asia (well, at least until the 11:30pm kurfew in Laos anyway) to make a dollar or two. There's nothing like walking through a night market, like in Luang Prabang, to challenge your senses and expand your view of the world, living and life. Gotta love it. Seriously, gotta love it.

The Mekong Charm, Laos

The highlight in Laos was the two day trip down the Mekong River by slow boat. The Mekong, which meanders through South East Asia, was a pleasant and scenic surprise. Two days of singing, drinking, chatting whilst watching Laotian river life was humbling. It's a part of the world that is so quiet, yet provides so much to its people, and goes about it in its own little way.

Bye Bye Bangkok

In the last two weeks, we have travelled by plane, van, coach, ferry, tuk tuk, boat, car, motorbike, train, bus, foot, metro train, taxi, scooter to get to our destinations. We have travelled for hours and hours at a time, to get around this tiny part of the world. Our holiday was over in the first week; we are now living life as travellers and it is a life worth living. We are thriving on the learning, exploring and discovering of it all. Bye Bye Bangkok.

New Year's Eve, Koh Phangan, Thailand

Hello all, well we have finally arrived in Thailand, and our first stop is Koh Phangan, for the full moon New years beach party. Estimated over 30,000 people attend this beach party. have a look at the photos below, had a great couple of days here, chilled out at our bungalows and sank a few chang's beer.