The Moped Diaries

Now that our travels are well and truly over we are getting thoroughly established in our new home here in Vancouver. This has meant acquiring grown-up things like furniture which has involved me becoming well aquainted with the returns section of Ikea where I am now known as “two left sides Smith” after some unfortunate flat-pack incidents. Here’s us in our apartment before we had any proper furniture…..

After the restrictions on car sizes that we endured in Bermuda I have now been able to acquire something a little larger and purchased a vehicle that resembles a second hand Starship Enterprise (Dulcie wears a Lieutenant Uhura outfit). On the same futuristic theme I bought a robot vacuum cleaner that we named Edgar Hoover. Unfortunately we got a clumsy one (it kept bumping into things) which also had an attitude problem and decided to break down under the bed. Needless to say it was returned and I am now back with the traditional upright version.

We have also now got full HD cable tv (a luxury after the two and a half channels we had in Bermuda) and one of those new fangled intelligent video recorders which we told we liked “Friends” and “CSI”. Unfortunately it is now recording these programmes at a rate far faster than we can watch them. It even stopped us watching something else last night just so that it could record yet another episode.

The start of this new life does, however, mark the end of an incredible adventure with highlights too numerous to mention (although anyone visiting us will get the full 5 hour slide show – each day). Our spare room is, as always, open for visitors and bookings have already been taken. Until the next adventure……………..

For the first time in over five years I have had to scrape the ice off my car (yet another rental car but we’ve upgraded from “Rent-a-Wreck” to “Budget”) and it is now snowing heavily. But we’d better get used to this because we’ve finally heard that our Canadian immigration application has been approved!! And our apartment should be ready before Christmas!! And we’ve got job interviews!! So forgive us if you don’t get a Christmas card this year as things are a little in turmoil for us at the moment.

For those curious about where we will be living, here’s a dodgy scanned image with a big arrow….

And a slightly better picture…

I guess this means our travels really are over now; unless I start working on a sequel!

Have a fabulous Christmas and may 2008 bring you everything you wish for.

We’ve seen one big Buddha (Dulcie is the one in the hat)….

And over twelve thousand little Buddhas, each one unique (we’ll take their word for that)…

So now it’s time to leave Hong Kong and head back to Canada. Dulcie may be a little slimmer now having been on the “chopstick diet” for some time. It’s not just that food is difficult to eat with chopsticks (especially birthday cake) but the traditional Chinese food is not always very appetizing (the skewered ox tongue was only slightly more tempting than the sweet and sour tripe).
We have, however, been suitably impressed with the public transport here. With one wave of a magic pre-paid card we’ve been able to ride the tram, the bus, the funicular railway (my favourite!), the ferry, the train and buy chocolate from the local shop (Dulcie’s favourite).
Tomorrow we’ll fly over the international date line again so we’ll land before we set off (it’s a good job we didn’t fly on Dulcie’s birthday or I’d have to buy her two presents and she’d be an extra year older).

A slight change of travel plans – we are now in Hong Kong!! After four weeks of Cambodia, delivering 26 water filters, building two classrooms and touring around we decided it was a case of “seen one temple; see ’em all” and extended our 6 hour layover in Hong Kong to ten days. This gave us the chance to visit some old friends (Graeme and Fredrique) who now live here on a boat. During our visit, Graeme offered to take me kayaking around Discovery Bay.

He obviously hadn’t read the earlier blog entry regarding my expert kayaking skills and true to form after a short while we were swimming instead of paddling. This shouldn’t have been a problem as Dulcie and Fred were following in the dinghy but they’d run out of fuel! Fortunately the coast guard weren’t required and we all got back safely (if a little wet).

There’s an interesting karaoke bar next to our guesthouse where we are staying on a side street in Siem Reap. It’s not open during the day but at night there’s always six or seven local young women dressed in their best (skimpiest) clothes sitting in there facing the entrance but not singing. In fact I’ve never seen anyone in there singing. They did, however, seem very keen for me to sing a song with them when I walked past last night without Dulcie. I have my suspicions about this place!

Rules of the road…………. there aren’t any! The traffic system here takes a little getting used to. Although they officially drive on the right, this, like all other normal road rules, appears to be a recommendation only. The technique for turning left usually involves swapping lanes well ahead of your turning and dodging the oncoming traffic until you reach your junction so scenes like this (from our tuk-tuk) are all too common….

It’s as if nobody stops but nobody has right of way. Somebody we met who has lived here for several years described it as an excellent example of advanced mathematical chaos theory which would work great if it wasn’t for the added complications of pot holes, stray dogs, school children riding mopeds with four passengers and confused tourists trying to cross the road (they also drive on the pavement!).

As an extra bit of volunteer work (as if we weren’t worn out enough by shovelling all the sand and gravel for the water filters!) we got involved in building a make-shift classroom at a voluntarily run school at one of the local Bhuddist temples. This involved sawing and hammering to build chairs and tables for the extra 100 children who wanted to attend. At the completion of construction the chief monk wanted to bless us with holy water which basically involved him and his assistant throwing buckets of cold water over us (I’m the chubby, bald, pale looking one)……

In the intrests of decency, Dulcie wasn’t able to de-robe in the same manner as us blokes so we asked the monk to only splash a little water. Unfortunately this seemed to get translated to “a right good soaking” so Dulcie dripped all the way home (much to the annoyance of the tuk-tuk driver).

Knees a-trembling I find myself in the exact same spot as Angelina Jolie in her Lara Croft outfit before being swallowed by a Hollywood special effect. Do I detect a waft of her exotic perfume lingering in the decaying Angkor ruins or is it the extra strong mosquito repellent Dulcie made me wear?

We delivered our first water filter yesterday to a school on the outskirts of the town we’re staying in. It made all the washing of sand and stones seem worthwhile and gave us one of those warm fuzzy feelings inside.

I was puzzled as to how the water from the water filters was tested to see if the filter is functioning correctly as there are no laboratories here. Then I found out – today we were offered a glass of water from one of the filters set up in the factory. If we turn up tomorrow I guess it’s working (or that warm fuzzy feeling may be due to something else).

We started work today building the water filters for the local villages (for more info have a look at the link on the right). Our first job was sifting and washing sand to go in the filters. This is a bit like washing dirt! Before long we were covered in sweat and Dulcie’s shoes were full of sand; it was just like being back on the beach in Bermuda. Tomorrow we will progress to gravel.

I’m attempting to pick up a bit of the local lingo but the Khmer alphabet has 33 consonants and 24 vowels (the Welsh could learn something there) so progress is slow. I’ve also leant that there are approximately 1,000 temples around Angkor Wat so if we visit one a day we should be out of Cambodia some time in 2011.