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Blog Day 122 Mon 5th September 2011
So today is our last day in South East Asia, a day we have dubbed Happy Monday. Not because of the fact that we are leaving, but because of the fact that everybody seems to be so miserable!
We have a few little jobs to do today before we make our way off to the airport. The first one being to exchange some of the library that Trish has found herself carrying around, and the second is to get to a post office so we can send off our postcards and other bits that are weighing us down.
Both of the places we need are located not far from Bugis street so we pack up our luggage, leave what we are not taking at the hotel and make our way to there.
Our first stop is a second hand bookstore. Trish's mobile library now consists of 2 Twilight Saga books (Twilight and New Moon) and the South East Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet Guide. All three of these books are as thick as the yellow pages, and Trish often finds herself using them as some form of hop up to give Dan a smooch. Dan's James Pattison book is tiny in comparison however it does look as if it's been carried around the world more than once. The little old dragon took one look at Dan's book and turned her nose up at it, she then offered Trish $3 for the lot. Let's just say we walked out of that place laughing at her! Silly old bint!
The next bookstore looks a little more promising as the guy there takes the Lonely Planet Guide off our hands for $5, this is however an information bookstore so he's not interested in the Twilight books. Another store also snubs all our books saying they have too many of them (hello you're a BOOKSHOP!)
Finally the last store we try is also offering rubbish prices and somehow Trish has managed to buy the next Twilight book in the series. So after an hour or so of book bashing we end up right back where we started with 3 heavy books and an unwanted James Pattison best seller!
Next on the agenda is the post office. Things go pretty smoothly here as the lady we are dealing with seems more than happy to help. So before long we have another parcel packaged up (thanks to Dan's days of watching art attack & a whole roll of cello tape later), and a ton of postcards winging their way back to England.
Back at the hotel we pick up our bags and book a cab to the airport. As we are checking in for our flight we notice that the destination our plane is heading for is Cairns, with a stop-over in Darwin. We try to sweet talk the lady behind the counter into letting us stay on the flight to Cairns as we are really not fussed about going to Darwin. She asks a few of her colleagues and does some tapping away on her computer but in the end we have no joy (computer says no!). So Darwin here we come!
We think it is fair to say that we leave South East Asia with some pretty mixed feelings. The one thing we can honestly say that we have found out about ourselves in this part of the world is that we are both 100% 'western travellers'. We like our little creature comforts and being in civilised areas. Having said that we don't think we would have changed the way that we went about travelling this part of the world at all.
We have seen some amazing sites & gone from awe inspiring to tragic, and met some cool people along the way. Our eyes have been opened to how other people live and go about their day to day lives relying heavily on tourism to make ends meet.
All in all we are glad that we came here however we both think that once is enough!
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