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| 2020 |
2021 |
2022
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| 1.
Mallee & Mt. Gambier |
2. The Flood
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3. Cultured Out! |
4.
Across Arnhem Land - 1
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5.
Across Arnhem Land - 2 |
6.
Vietnam |
After a stay back home for 2
1/2 weeks - long enough for us to experience
winter in Castlemaine, and long enough to
realise that, while experiencing some chilly
weather is quite nice, there's a lot to be
said for getting away somewhere warmer for a
while. So we are away on a trip booked
months and months ago, when travel was just
beginning to start up again after Covid; a
tour with "Inspiring Vacations", with whom
we went to Sri Lanka just before Covid hit.
That trip was excellent (apart from the
weight gain from all the unrestricted
excellent food); will it be as good
post-Covid?
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 Well -
while not the same as Sri Lanka, of course,
we found nothing to complain about
with this trip. It all went smoothly; we
were put up in an excellent hotel in Saigon
/Ho Chi Minh City and a very reasonable one
in Siem Reap; both of them were very well
located, in easy walking distance of the old
parts of town, and not stuck out in some
outer suburb; the cruise boat for our seven
days on the Mekong was excellent; the fact
that we were going upstream, against the
current,  seemed
not to matter; the food and the staff on the
boat were excellent; and despite it being
the rainy season in Vietnam and Cambodia, we
had very little rain.
We began with a flight to Ho Chi Minh
City, with Vietnam Airlines. A full-service
airline, but not quite as full service as
some others - at one of our meals we were
offered two options, only to be told that
one of the options had run out! So - why
offer?
But we landed in Ho Chi Minh City,
were met, and taken in a minibus to the Rex
Hotel. A lovely old restored hotel. We had a
day of time to ourselves; we walked up to
the nearby  (French
colonial) Opera House, where we found the
the "Bamboo Circus" ( Vietnam's answer to
Cirque de Soleil) was performing that night.
We went. Excellent!
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Then,
seven days living on "The Jahan" a lovely
Indian-styled cruise boat.  The
20 people in our group were joined by
another 24. It was over dinner here one
night we found that one of our dinner
companions was the sister of our next-door
neighbour from Allison Road in Elsternwick!
Small world.
 We
finished up in Siem Reap, in Cambodia, with
a tour of some of the temples of Angkor Wat.
We'd been here before, in 2005; the town had
become much more of a tourist destination,
but the sites we visited were not too
crowded, reflecting the fact that it is the
low season here.
The flight back was over Australia
from Derby to Melbourne and was very  bumpy.
The weather forecast on the news in
Melbourne that night showed us that we had
travelled back inside / on top of the
broad band of storms which caused Alice
Springs temperatures to drop to single digit
maximums and waterfalls to erupt all over
Uluru.
 Two
weeks in Victoria has been long enough to
wash, repack and want to swap fires and
jumpers and soup for warmer climes again.
The road up the centre is open again and the
motor home is not designed for travel on
rough unmade roads so it looks like we can
take off tomorrow , and head north. Escaping
the southern winter was one of the
motivating factors for getting our motor
home. This will be a real test of how we go
living in it for a prolonged  period.
Simon's
Journal
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