We arrived in Sydney about 5pm on Saturday, after traveling for an exhausting 24 hours - Phuket, to Bangkok, to Singapore, where Scoot added a 4 hour delay to our 3 hour layover, then on to Sydney at last. Since we will be visiting Sydney twice on our trip, it will be the last stop on our Australian tour, we decided to focus on the CBD (Central Business District). We stayed at the Mantra hotel, which is walking distance to pretty much, everything. We unpacked a...

With our transfer to the boat scheduled for 5:30pm, we got a 2:00pm checkout and planned for a nice lunch at the hotel. While I napped by the pool, Bill worked on our Phuket blog and pictures. A 2.5 hour bus ride later we boarded the M/V Pawara where we were shown to our cabin. We had booked the Master cabin because I really hate yucky accommodations. While this was the best on the boat, it was still far from great. Most cabins have bunk beds so you have to lie u...

Patong is in many ways like most beach towns. It's set up for tourists and they were here in droves. Although there are temples and other cultural activities in the area, our plan was to lie around for these few days and not do much of anything. This lack of a plan is likely, at least partially, responsible for leading me astray. Our first night in Patong we wandered down the main strip looking for the street food that Dessa now loves so much. Although there we...

Week two was certainly as interesting as week one! We checked our to do list of places to see and got busy so this will be another long post. Our mastery of the public transportation system continued to improve with practice. The bus system is very cheap at about $0.30 a ride but a bit erratic. Sometimes the bus we were waiting for would just drive right past the stop and they didn't follow a set route. We learned to follow along using Google maps to be sure we...

Our first week in Thailand has been fantastic. The visual is hard to describe in words so this will probably be a very long post. The traffic is nuts. So many cars, buses and trucks, then throw in tuk-tuks and scooters galore whizzing around all of them. Apparently none of the traffic rules apply to scooters. They run the lights, squeeze between and around everyone else including pedestrians and drive on the wrong side of the road winding through on-coming traf...