Well to everyones great surprise we arrived home early as a little Valentines Day treat for all our family and friends. With Ro being home for only 10 days before heading back to Sydney there were some busy busy days (filled with job and apartment hunting) and even busier nights - far too much school night drinking went on. Orlas back for a few more weeks to 
study so hopefully now that Ro's headed off a lot more studying and a lot less drinking will be the result (haha!!). Thanks to everyone for reading the blog, we hope it didn't depress you all and instead made you want to do some travelling and come visit us in Sydney, there will always be a bed, couch or floor for any of you!xxx p.s. if anyone knows of a cheap way to get some 4000 photos developed do let us know!!!!
Thanks to the generosity of Orla's parents we were treated to the luxury of 3 nights in the very fancy Marriott Hotel. The Hotel was really spectacular with amazing furnishings, but have to say the prices for food & drink were a bit of a shock. Normally in Thailand we'd spend between $2/3 each on our dinner, but in the Marriott you wouldn't get a sandwich for less than $6.
Brr...its cold (and rainy) in Hue. Got in late and so had a few beers, a feed and Ro greedily held the pool table in a local bar for the evening! Next morning it was still cold 
and rainy (thank god we invested in winter coats in Hoi An), so off we set with socks and flip flops (the style) to visit the Citadel. The Citadel is pretty impressive but harder to enjoy while avoiding the puddles of mud and water (and the people looking at us strangely in our socks and flip flops!).
We got a night bus from Nha Thrang to Hoi An which was fine and luckily our hotel let us check in at 6am. Hoi An is a lovely town that feels really authentic and the people are so nice and welcoming. It is also probably the tailoring capital of the world as it seems that half the shops here make clothes, we were warned that it gets addictive. By an amazing stroke of luck we arrived just in time to get our orders in before tet (the New Year festival), Orla got a lovely suit and shirt made in about 2 days, pity her dress didn't turn out as expected (a bad design choice)!! Ro got some trousers and shirts made, we both have to say the tailors were really lovely and they are very cheap compared to Thailand but still seem to maintain a high standard.
The food in Vietnam is great, so we d
ecided to give one of the cooking schools in Hoi An a go. They had different dishes for the half-day & full-day classes so we decided to split up so we could get the most out of it. Orla's class covered starters and garnishes (she now knows how to make a rose out of a tomato skin!) and Ro's prepared mains, the classes were great (were both looking forward to trying out some of the dishes in a normal kitchen).
Lunar calendar and normally falls somewhere between the end of Jan and Mid-Feb. This year "The year of the Rat" began on Feb 7th and we were in Hoi an for the celebrations. After enjoying a few free cocktails in our hotel we headed to town for the festivities, 
there was a carnival near the river and a really impressive fireworks display. Nearly everything shuts down for a few days after tet and it was really good to see the Vietnamese be able to relax and enjoy there holiday (most people seem to work from 6am-10pm 6/7 days a week) so they defo deserve one. So "Chuc mung nam moi" (Happy new year).
Nha Thrang is a nice place. The beach is grand but a little dirty and the waves were seriously huge (bigger than Bondi) making it impossible to swim! The place we stayed in was great with a nice roof top terrace.
e poor snorkelling we had a great time and the lunch buffet served on the boat was fabulous, we were then treated to the "floating bar". This consisted of our guide sitting in a tube with a crate of red wine bottles floating around him. We all jumped off the roof of the boat, were 
thrown floating rings and then fed free wine until it was all gone. I'm sure the boats insurance company charged a lot for this level of safety!!! It was great fun though! Next island stop allowed Ro time to display his volleyball skills andthen we headed to an aquarium where we got up close and fed some sea turtles.
After a reasonably pleasant 5 hour bus journey we arrived in Dalat. This town really does feel like a town in the French Alps in the Springtime, absolutely lovely. We even lucked out with our great accommodation "Dream 2" which is for nothing and comes with the best breakfast ever!!!
factories and even a silk factory. We also climbed around (and under) the Elephant 
Waterfalls and visited a "Crazy House" Hotel - very hard to explain, perhaps a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter land (how this ended up in Vietnam we have no idea)! Our bus leaving Dalat literally drove at 100 miles an hour even over one lane bridges, and interestingly enough had a large tree strappedto its roof!!!!
Mui Ne was such a great surprise. It is a small town build along a lovely beach in South Vietnam and not totally overrun with tourists. We found great accommodation with a pool, which was great as the weather was amazing but sometimes the sea was quite rough. We liked the place so much that we instantly upped our stay from 2 nights to 3.
Next morning we had an early bus out to the Cu Chi tunnels. This is where some of the Vietnamese soldiers and civilians lived during the war (some babies were even born here!). It is amazing how they even managed to build these, never mind live in them (the photo is a minature version of their layout). 
Obviously the set up and tour in this place is very anti-American (the tour guides are very proud of the methods they used to trap, injure and kill the American soldiers). Orla had no interest in crawling through these teeny and dusty tunnels (super claustrophobic!), Ro gave it a shot but the returned because the dust was really getting to his chest. The trip was really worth doing and the tunnels really are an amazing piece of history.
ut only took 6 hours, so was grand. We passed the floating villages on the way and saw kids walking the plank to go to school on little boats!!! We didn't really like Phnom Penh that much, but we did the tourist think and visited The Killing fields and S21 school and as inappropriate as it seems we were brought to a shooting range on the way, so I (Ronan) decided to fulfill a lifelong ambition and try my hand at firing a machine gun, I have to say it wasn't a particulary enjoyable experience especially knowing what was coming next.
R) for so long it was no surprise that it wasn't too bad (a bit bumpy) but the road has been slightly improved in recent times and we saw the construction of the new road so future travellers to SR are in for a treat ! Even though our bus slyily dropped us off at a guesthouse out of town, we decided to stay as it was really nice and only $4 a night. The main attraction of SR is definitely Ankor Wat but the town itself is quiet nice and almost tranquil. We took the first day to relax and headed out to the temples for sunset which wasn't too bad but we were shocked by the number of tourists (come to think of it there is an unbelievable amount of 5 star resorts in the area).
sights over the 12 hours and still weren't bored even if we got a little tired. I could well imagine spending 2/3 days there but we were happy enough with what we saw even if we missed out on some of the temples on the outskirts. We were also privlidged enough to visit the temple that featured in tomb raider (something to be really proud of!!)
When we arrived in KL we never got an entry stamp for Malaysia so we arrived at the border to enter Thailand a little worried especially as it rumoured to be a little dodgey but luckly enough everything was fine. Our bus left us on the outskirts of Krabi so the company could sell us some tours (some 20 mins before the ferry to Phi Phi was supposed to leave), but we managed to find a tuk tuk to take us to the ferry and after rushing like headless chickens it left 30 mins late!!
of a shock as we expected all of Asia to be really cheap but a room on Phi Phi cost us more than any night in
NZ, but as its quiet small and we did have a nice air-conditioned room. The island itself doesn't offer as much as the surrounds and a 8-hour 500 baht snorkeling trip was unbelievably cheap as we got to see Bamboo Island, monkey bay, Phi Phi ley which are just magnificent and we also paid a visit to Maya beach (where the beach was filmed). The snorkeling in Phi Phi is fantastic (considerably better than the barrier reef) and as we've spent a bit of time in tropical waters were getting 
better at knowing what to look for and identifying the fish, we even saw an Anemone (Nemo) fish.
After a random stopover in Darwin on our way out of Oz we reached Singapore. My god this city is so clean - we literally didn't see a single piece of litter anywhere. The transport here is also amazing with a fantastic monorail running throughout the city. We didn't have a chance to do much here as we only stayed one night but we did of course have the obligatory "Singapore Sling" in Raffles and wander the city before we took a sleeper train to Kuala Lumpur.
ed heavily during the day and so we weren't too impressed as this made the place feel a bit dreary but luckily it cleared up and the market really came alive at nighttime so we had dinner (Orla had delicious Satay chicken - mmm) and a few beers in a street side restaurant and a few more beers on the roofgarden of our hostel where we had some good views. Unfortunately due to the monsoon season being in southern Malaysia the boats going out to some of the supposedly fabulous islands were all shut so we got a train (and then a boat) up to Georgetown which is just another colonial city but it didn't have much to offer (our hostel was rather zoo like with rats, mice, lizards etc.) so we caught an early morning bus up to Thailand.
we all rented a super apartment with a pool and air conditioning (essential in this part of the world!)! Cairns is super sticky hot and unfortunately as its stinger (jelly fish to the rest of us) season there was no chance of swimming on the beaches. There is however a fantastic huge swimming lagoon built just off the beach thats free for everyone and has great bbq facilities surrounding it! 
We all headed off on a boat trip to the
Great Barrier Reef, the boat was fantastic and not too bumpy (on the way back anyway!). Meals were great but unfortunately the outer reef was quite rough and this made snorkelling quite difficult. A reef shark swam past us but that was about it. We did a scuba dive which was going fine until Orla got seperated from the rest of the group (scary!) but sure it was all fine in the end!
We also did a rainforest tour into the Daintree forest (after a few too many drinks in a bar the night before - painful!) which was great (too many mosquito bites after though), swam in a lovely creek (great for the hangovers) and saw the creepy eyes of some crocodiles on a boat trip down the river.
