Just a quick one.

We had a great trip from Germany through Czech, Slovenia and are now in a beautiful island town called Hvar. We have a beatutiful yacht and the weather and scenery are amazing.

The highlight of the way here was a Sloveniantown called Bled, absolutely amazing town around a beautiful fresh water lake with a church in middle and surrounded by Alps mountains.

Hope you are all well and will update more in about a week.

Love Sar

I just arrived back in Paris after visiting a beautiful city called Chartre south of Paris (renowned for it,s huge twin spire cathedral). Was there for mate Ben,s wedding and it was bloody awesome. Ben and Leonia are an amazing couple and every person there made the experience even better; The venue was spectacular, an enourmous Chatteau sanding on it,s own amongst old trees and it,s own personal lake.

The ceremony was at a nearby church and afterwards we enjoyed so,e beautiful french cuisine (dad, i,ll get the menu for Vaughn) and then danced the night away. Surprisingly i ended up in a dance off against an old uni mate who slit his chin open doing the caterpiller dance... i feel partly responsible, but can now say there really was blood on the dance floor. Don't let that detract fro, the classiness of the night. It was a beautiful formal affair, so much so that i ended up arguing politics with the brides father until 7am. Once again congrats Ben and Leonia, ur legends.

Now i tour paris for 5days, catch up w Gra and Jane for 1st leg of tour de frqnce and then move onto Germqany to finally meet up with Danita and crew for world cup final.

love u all and be in touch soon;

Well, Rio has been a LOT of fun... after hot stepping it accross from Chile for 3 days, Jo and i arrived in Rio 4 days ago.... sorry mum .. but i don't think i've been sober since we arrived!!! Super party town. I'm now at the airport on my way to Paris for Benni Schlesingers wedding to Leonia, which i'm sure will be an absolute blast.

Rio is an amazing place, mountainous terrain, great beaches, great surf and their peoples are so passionate about their football... Ronaldo and Ronaldinio are gods here!! Oh yeah and u can buy (and set off) fireworks in the street!!! have met some awesome peoples and i'll miss this place.

I'm paying way too much for this internet at the moment so must go, but i'll write again from London. Love you all, will put some photo's up soon too ... Sascha

I don't have much time (or photo's on me) to gvie u a decent run down since Cusco, but i can say that:

- we did 4 day bike and trek to Machu Picchu which was bloody awesome, there'll be lots of pics about that

- had a fun couple of days in Gringo City, Cusco

- Visited the hightest navigatable lake in the world, Lake Titicaca, saw the best sun rises and sunsets EVER

- crossed the border into Bolivia, had a couple of days in Copacobana (not the Brazillian beach one, the Bolivian lakeside one)

- now in Bolivian capital La Paz, a buzzing city. Only catching a few hours of it before heading north into the jungle (5am in tomorrow) to see some wildlife and get eaten by mozzies (they love me, in Colca Canyon Joe gotone bite, i got 20+, can't wait to see how tasty they find me in the jungle)

So all is healthy and well. Kinda busy as we have 3 weeks to finish Bolivia, travel to through top of Argentina and have a decent week in Brazil.

Hope ur all well in Ossie-land and will have some pics and stories posted in about 4-5days.

Luv heaps, Sascha.

It´s been pretty bust since my last entry, we´ve covered a fair bit of ground, some good and bad bus rides and we´ve met some fun people. If ur time limited, skip to bottom or goto photo albums to see some pics.

One thing that I missed in my last blog was that we went to see a Peruvian Jazz band in Miraflores (Lima suburb). These guys were tops. About 12 guys in the band, with bongo´s, some strange beat boxes, full brass section and a percussion guys who played about 10 different things including a hinged box and a horses jaw… pretty amazing stuff, shame that we couldn´t understand any lyrics or any of their many jokes, but a very entertaining quiet night out.

A German couple and 3 Canadian guys have been pretty good value. The way it pans out is that we ´gringo touristos´ take similar routes on our trips so it´s often convenient to travel together or meet up at the next town. We left the Germans once we hit Nazca and bumped into the Canadians when doing the Nazca lines flight. See http://www.labyrinthina.com/nazca.htm or skepdic.com/nazca.html for more details. ´Nazca lines were discovered only about 90 years ago and have ´woo much mystery´ surrounding their origins or reasons for being there. I believe that many were to help people navigate as well as bearing some religious/connection-to-mother-earth significance where the people of Nazca would walk out or carve out these shapes. But for the sake of tourism they say they could have been formed to communicate with aliens etc, believe what you will, they´re still pretty damn impressive not matter how they got there. The flight to see them was just as fun as seeing them. We were in a little 6 seater airplane which banked heavily side to side so we could get a good view by looking straight down as it was banked. This generated some decent g-forces and could easily upset the stomach. Of course Jo and I found it quite amusing when one of the canadians had a couple of ´near miss burps´, could have been messy!!

Nazca didn´t have much more to offer besides these lines, so we decided to keep pushing through and took the same day bus to Arequipa.

Arequipa is a beautiful town, surrounded by mountains (some snow capped) and one smoking volcano, and has beautiful rustic streets housing buildings made from a whitish volcanic rock. It is the second biggest city in Peru with a population of 1 or 2 mill (have been told 2 different stories). I thought that my trip to China wowed me with their taxi, but Arequipa is something different! About 90% of inner city traffic is little Daewoo taxi´s with no will to live. No traffic lights, just a lot of tooting and self confidence. The view down onto an intersection from our hostel terrace prduced a game where we would chose a taxi about 30m from the intersection and say whether he would make it through without stopping.... no accidents but some amazing close calls, very entertaining.

Our hostel owner was very helpful (free plug Marlons Hostel and Travel) and within a day of arriving we were off on a 3 day trek down into the Colca Canyon. This canyon is the second deepest in the world about 1100m (beaten only by a nearby gorge which is 100m deeper) and boasts some amazing sights. There are a number of remote farming villages perched on the sides of this huge canyon which runs the full length of the Andes, from Chile to the Pacific Ocean. We hiked for about 5hrs each day, 1st day down to the lowest point (Colca River) and back up a couple of hundred meters to the village where we would spend the night. At the bottom was a nice Indiana Jones style suspension bridge. I offered Jo $1 for ever sideways meter that he could sway it! The area is rich in fruit growing and there are terraces lining the hills with water irrigated from the melting now above. There are a number of buildings without roofs indicating that some farmers have packed up and headed to busier towns or cannot rely on the water from the hills any more. They have a ritual where a village councilor joins with other villagers at the foot of the mountains and makes an offering to ´mother earth´ asking for grace and continued supply of water to help their crops. Global warming is a big concern of theirs and if the ice ceases to form on mountain tops, their villages could be wiped out for good. I guess the only consolation is that they have such an attractive environment and can rely on good tourist dollars to keep them going.

One of my aims on this trip is to see as many sunrises and sunsets as possible. I´ve been photographing some and just sitting back enjoying the rest. Watching the sun gradually make it´s way into and out of the canyon is really beautiful. Every now and then you need to deliberately lift your head, take your eyes off the rocky track and soak in some of the surroundings -- aaah the serenity!

The second day in the canyon was an easy 1.5hr trek down to an Oasis on the river’s edge. This has a couple of pools filled with warm water, not from the river, but from a natural stream running from inside the cliff face. We had a couple of hours of frolicking (with frisbee and boardies) and relaxing in the Oasis before a full 1100m 3.5hr climb back up to the top, yeah, I was really looking forward to that!! There were a couple of tourists who opted for a Mule ride up, but our whole group (including a couple of Germans who´d both hurt themselves on he way down) did it mule and donkey free. It was so fresh and relieving standing at the top. We headed back for some feed where I organized a surprise birthday cake for Jo – big old 31. They don´t have ovens to our tour guide (Able, pronounced Ab-lay) improvised and made a choc covered, multi layer pancake cake with strawberry and caramel in between layers…3-1 candles and all, jo was wrapped (despite feeling shabby) and we went to some club/bar in a guys garage for a couple of beers to celebrate.

Next day we were up at crack of dawn again to see the 3m wingspan Colca Canyon Condors. Well, we reckon they were more like 1.5m, but they were still pretty impressive. Jo and I had some ´loose bowels´ to couldn´t enjoy it as much as we´d like. The bus trip back to Arequipa was a shocker, super bumpy as we wound up past 4900m altitude and held our pelvic floors to avoid any accidents! Great fun. A day of recovery back in Arequipa, a fun night out with our guide where Jo slept, I got home at 3pm after dancing up a storm! I wanted to learn some salsa, but the locals ended up asking me to teach them my dancing???? Riddle me that, I tried teaching them, but told them that the true key is in the beer.. J

So it´s 7am on 22/5, we´ve just arrived in Cuzco (elev 3300m) and today will organize our Inca Trail Trek. They say you need to book the trail well in advance, but we´ve been up for winging it the whole way. We´ve heard that the actual trail can get pretty busy so may take an alternative trek (locals track) with less tourists, cheaper and still finished at the Inca Ruins on top of Machu Picchu. My next post will probably be in about a week with news on how awesome this is…. if our planless plan works!!

Love you all, send me news of how you are (or comment straight onto this blog) and will be in touch soon… Sascha

Token ´tourist buying fruit at a market shot´

The Huacachina desert oasis (from previous blog)

If Roger David ever got into desert wear.

Low qual pic, but... da boys carven it up on the sandboards!!!

Yeah us and these classic canadians fitted into that plane and "pulled some g´s"

Forgot to include this story.... while waiting for our bus in Nazca, we came across a street parade. It was their Annual Tourism Parade. Some lady (noticing that we were backpack wearing gringo tourists) asked us to jump up onto the front float with Miss Tourism and her beautiful friends. We paraded a few laps of the town throwing out lollies to kids and waving. Felt a bit out of place, but was a pretty funny experience. Jo has a pic of me up on the Float Throne kissing the hand of Miss Tourism.. i´ll try to put it up later!!

Andy Norman has given me a virus!!! I can no longer let a stupid use of camo go unphotographed...

Me with Colca Canyon in background

Indiana Jones style bridge, you can even make out the foundations of the last bridge.... they didn´t tell us what happened to that!

Sunrise on the farming village where we stayed in the canyon. They farm their crops in terraces all up the face of the canyon, with 500 year old irrigation systems... once a year all farmers and neighbouring villagers come together for a "cleaning party" where they clean their irrigation traps during the day, drink Pisco in the afternoon and eat 100´s of guinnea pigs by night.... for a whole week!

Jo relaxing at the riverside warm Oasis before our 3hr climb back out.

Happy birthday Jonas....

View of Cabanaconde at top of canyon out of hostel window... 5:30am

HUGE condors... very impressive and accompanied by some dive bombing hawks too.

This was our meal on my 1st night in Peru... all meat. Blood saussage in foreground, with Cervesa (mmm beer) and some intestines and other 4 odd kilos of meat kept warm on the coal fired platter.

Second night in Lima...action shot with me, jo and his stalker..

Sealion and seal on Islas Beraccas near Pisco (see previous blog)

Crazy taxi´s.. or motor bikes... i don´t know, but get the hell out of their way

I realised that Lan Chille airline suck!! After getting me to Lima 31hrs late, i still didn´t have my bags. Waited around for another day and a bit for bags to arrive then hit the road!

We stayed in a nice hostel in Miraflores call Inca Lodge. Seems that the Inca Trail brings a lot of attention so many places have ´Inca´ in front. With 2 days waiting, we covered Lima and Miraflores pretty well. Just ´had´ to goto Hooters bar, just to say that i´ve been to one. The streets are pretty busy, seems to be a bit more order than China, but they love driving fast... haven´t yet seen a crash! touch wood. Being westerners, or Gringos as the locals call us, we seem to attract a lot of attention from people trying to sell stuff, including drugs. Kinda sad as it means that many gringos do take them up on the offer.

The streets feel a little unsafe, although we haven´t seen or experienced anything dodgy. We have heard a number of 1st hand experiences of people having stuff stolen from their rooms or taxi window being smashed and bag grabbed. We met a guy who came to a Jazz club with us who at the end asked to be paid for his ´Antonio´s security service´, we figured he just tagged along for some free beers and jazz. Thuoght we should give him something just in case he decided to turn around an rob us. 6 Solas = under $2, so well worth it.

I am very thankfull that Jo speaks spanish pretty well, he was even able to negotiate a free jug of beer with our super meaty meal - check out my South Amerca photo albumn.

Seems i have some kind of travelling jinx. We booked a bus from Lima to Pisco, tourist agency showed us exactñy where to go to board bus, but it happened to be the wrong terminal... damn... next bus was 30mins later and carried few people who had the same experience. Arrive in Pisco (convenientñy named after the local Grappa-like drink). Pisco Sour is the chick´s version w lots of lemon and Pisco Pura is the blokes version, Pura = straight. This was an interesting town with a booming market. Hundreds of stalls selling almost averything. Most disturbing was the way they sold chickens, just plucked, cleaned and layed out on display, swishing flys away and waiting for some bacteria to arrive. But they´ve been doing it this way for hundreds of years and seems to be no problem. Maybe we´re ´too´causious in Aus.

From Pisco we take a bus and boat to some nearby Islands (sorry name escapes me) which were made famous from their richness in .... bird dung! Surprising that Peru´s main export strength many years ago was fertiliser. These islands still have a great wealth of this dung and in same places it is about 70m thick! We didn´t go to these islands just to look at brid crap, the main draw card was the huge abundance of wildlike tout there. Some call it poors man´s Gallapogas Islands and these islands showed off some awesome animals, seals, sea lions, penguins a heap of birds etc. Very impressive seeing baby seals learning how to climb up the rocks, slipping down clumsilly as well as vultures airing their wings. I´m no nature buff, but this was REALLY COOL. I saw a heap of boobies while out there too, the booby is one of the main dung producers and a big which dives into the water to catch fish below..... no matter how old i get, i´m still impressed by boobies.

On the way back in the speed boat, different birds were flying in formation right next to our boat, like they were showing off how fast they could fly. Then we saw thousands of them dive bombing a school of fish.. About 50 at a time they plummet into the water killing all these fish.. very impressive.

A trip to Ica and nearby Huacachina (bus ran without hiccup, maybe i´m not jinxed) brought us to a touristy town which is an oasis amongst a vast expanse of sand dunes. So for the last 2 days we´ve been here, chilling out by the pool (it has a real Cancun feel to it) and going for sand boarding and dune buggy rides. Sandboarding is nothing like snow boarding. I soon learnt that u keep ur weight BACK and don´t carve. I managed to hit the deck real bad, smacked my head and seriously saw stars, any harder and i would have seen tweety birds. I got a pic of my divot, shook it off and kept going. Initiat¡lly i thought, oh this buggy is going to be crap. But the unregulated and laid back nature of the people here seems to allow a lot of room for error and makes jumping over sand dunes in a big 4x4 pretty exciting. Weaving through dunes and getting weightless in a huge 8 seater V8 with a big chance of rolling really got the adrenaline pumping.

Well off now to Nazca to look at some ´bizarra´ lines in the ground. Should be fun.

All well and healthy. Pass this link onto others and will write again in about a week. Love Sascha

Well it feels like i've been gone about a week but i've only just landed in Sth America!!

It was bound to be an adventure when my flight depating Melbourne was delayed by about 2 hours with a hydraulic leak. No i'm not complaining, i am very thankful that they found the leak and had a spare part in Melbourne. The spare part was an O-ring worth about a dollar. But powerful enough to halt a few hundred people and a 747. Better safe than sorry i say.

Our flight had a stop over in NZ and the delay meant that about 30 passengers miss their connecting flight to Santiago, Chile. We were given the option of taking a flight straight through to LA and then back down, or having hotel, 3 meals etc paid for and stay overnight in Auckland. Thankfully this is a holiday and not work; i'll only be holding Jo up in Lima. Hotel it was. Nothing too flash, but relaxing, knowing that i'd made the right choice of getting a nice sleep and cruising while waiting for the Santiago flight one day later. I managed to get in a run, swim and gym [swim lasted only about 5 mins thanks to Auckland's sunny but chilly weather]. I tried to hook up with a frisbee mate Shane who lives in Auckland to no avail, short of time and hotel in Aucklands equivalent of Mulgrave!! Thanks Tommy and catch ya next time Shane.

So now i have a 5hr wait in Santiago and expect to fly into Lima around midnight tonight - time zone is GMT-4hrs which means i'm 15 hrs behind you at the moment. So even though i've had a full day in NZ and have been flying for about 14hrs, it's 4pm 9th May - so i feel like i'm in a bit of a time warp - been travelling for 2 days, but only made 1 day progress!!

Sorry, no sights or stories yet, just  whinging about air transit. I did however catch my first glance of the snow capped Andes. Smog and cloud makes taking a good photo difficult. I'm sure i'll see plenty more of them and up close too, so will keep you posted.

In case you were wondering about my itinerary or wonder where i am if i haven't posted this blog for a while, i've attached a pic and my itinerary below.

Here's some more pics, mostly from KL, but some earlier ones that are worth showing. I've had a bit more spare time here, so have been able to see a few sights and snap up some pics too.

This is the KL Tower, 4th biggest in the world or in Commonwealth Games terms, WINNER of 4th place. Has some pretty awesome views, pretty high, engineering feat bla bla, same kind of story from most towers in the world... but 4th biggest!!

This is a little monkey that i came across when i visited some Limestone caves about 30km out of the city. The caves were pretty impressive. 270 steps to climb up to see them. They had about 4 hindu temples in them. This is fine, but they created a lot of rubbish and mess around the caves as well as the contant sounds of prayers and changy music, it kind of detracts from experiencing the caves properly. There were a heap of wild monkeys there though. They were very accostomed to humans, the one in the pic below was trying to grab something out of my bag. I also saw another one jump up and grab a bag of chips out of some kids hands... very amusing... for me!! A couple of pics down is the steps leading to the caves. In the foreground is some idol, said to be the biggest one of 'this particlar guy'.

This is me in the KL forest in the middle of the city. Very humid, but fresher in  amongst the trees. I wanted to sit and read there for a while, but the mozzies decided they had me on the menu instead. I though i'd bail before i got done by a mozzie that's been around. My camera is actually hanging from a tree to take this pic, sorry if it's a bit crooked.

This shows the climb up the steps, the caves at the top and the idol/statu in the foreground.

U need to look closely, but the display above my head shows 429km/h. That's on the Maglev train to the Shanghai airport, very good buzz!

For my whole time in China, i was continually amazed by their use of bamboo. A majority of buildings (even skyscrapers) are clad with bamboo rather than steel scaffolding. Here's a great example where they're using bamboo on a bridge!!

I have a friend who made a website just for Camo enthusiasts. I now had a compulsion to photograph bizarre camo sightings. Here's one of the best i've seen so far... camo tyres. Cheers Andy Norman and to anyone who loves camo.

Just something a little quirky. They change the carpet in the lifts at our hotel EVERY day.....

So Selamat Tinggal from me. Thanks for putting up with my sometimes winded stories, but i hope u enjoyed anyway. This is a good way to keep everyone in touch as well as being a good record for me to look back on later too.

I fly back on at night and will try to catch up with as many of you as possible before i leave for Sth America on 8th May.

Be well, love you all and catch you soon.

Sascha, Sarfy, Sar, The Sash XOXO

These are mostly hong kong.

Zhuhai - fight scene village where we had our foot massage - no happy endings!!!

I just had to do this!!

Tit ur head sideways - yes u get fined $1000 for playing a musical instrument - yes you get $3000 and 3 MONTHS JAIL for being drunk as opposed to $5000 and no jail for carrying firearms - Imagine if Santa came up here - the poor bugger who is likely to ba carrying a gun to protect all the pressies, always sings and is damn likely to have a heaps of cookies and whisky in him!!!! Oh yeah - fines for wearing unsuitable clothing too - i'm sure that includes tight jeans (sorry to all that don't know peachz, u won't get it)

Token tourist shot

Unexciting laser light show on HK harbour - makes u realise how impressive fireworks really are!

HK's airport, waiting area specially designed for me!!

I'll add more later. Hope u enjoy and feel free to comment.

Well folks, sorry it’s been a while since my last posting in Shanghai. Am now in Kuala Lumpur for the remainder of my trip and return home on Sat.

NOTE: I have always hated reading peoples long drawn out adventure travel stories. I must apologise. It seems that when you have a spare hour, you can really crank out a lot of information. So for those more time precious, here’s a summary of below:

• Shanghai air bad, technology good, taxi drivers dodgy

• Manufacturing/work stuff that you don’t care about

• Shanghai food good, ate weird egg

• Copy market, very entertaining and fun. Bought some cheap stuff

• Went on Maglev 400km/h train (google it for more info)

• In KL now, good weather, clean air, nice fruit – I moved my bed to find a small bottle of baby oil underneath, it’s either from previous tenant or Deon, I’ll let you decide

From what I remember of my last blog, I wrote just a little bit about Shanghai’s air and seemingly (more) organised traffic. I think I got used to the sulphur-phosphorous laden air as it stopped burning my nostrils by the 2^nd day there. Thankfully visibility was better which I put down to less heavy industry in the city. There is a HEAP of technological manufacture, signs just down my street for factories that manufacture for (or all of for all I know) LG and Panasonic. Our hotel in bang in the middle of a Technology Park, a bit away from the city, we need to take a ‘crazy’ cab to get anywhere (found out the hard way that there’s no much within 1/2 hr walking distance). On the note of cabs – I think I spoke of our dodgy cab driver in Guangzhou who offered a deal of RMB200 to take us to hotel, we declined, ended up being RMB115 – well similar offer came out here in Shanghai, RMB150, we declined, cost us RMB165; I reckon he took us the long way to sh** us!! Conversion rate is about AU$1:RMB5.6 if you care to work it out.

We visited 3 factories in our time in Shanghai and found them all to be very good. It’s difficult to get to the OEM source (original equipment manufacturer) in China as there are a number of trader/dealers, and visiting factories is the best way to get to the bottom of things. It’s difficult enough trying to communicate in person with many companies, so you can imagine how much stuffing around we’re saving – I’d hate to have to try to do all this by email and telephone!! Anyway 3 out of 4 people we met with were OEM’s and each had good manufacturing capabilities and different qualities useful to us. I won’t bore u with any more work detail, but we left Shanghai having built some good relationships and gathered a good understanding of what each company had to offer us.

Shanghai truly gave us the best food so far this trip. Deon may say otherwise as he doesn’t have great fondness for seafood, but he does get full points for venture outside his comfort zone. I took some photo’s of one seafood place that we went to (like most places) you can pick the swimming fish that you want to eat, but this place was something else. EVERY meal was displayed under gladwrap on a plate in the foyer. You don’t even need a menu. You see exactly what your meal is going to look like. We chose against the dish that had the goose head sitting as a finishing garnish on top of it. Mum gave me plenty of warning about eating bird products over here and I’ve been avoiding egg, chicken and duck as much as possible. Although, when my manliness was challenged regarding my hesitation to eat an ‘old mans egg’ I had to crumble. This plate of eggs, cut into 3rds or quarters, showed off the lovely inside colours of the egg. Different colour black and blue rings of these aged eggs looked great, but spelt out salmonella, blue cheese and gagging. Nevertheless, I had seen others eat them and seeing as there was a challenge in front of me I had a go. Sorry mum. The taste wasn’t too bad, I wouldn’t go back for seconds as it had that musty, fungussy kind of flavour, but there was flavour and I’m still alove today, so all is good. I didn’t bother even trying to get deon to have a try as it took enough arm twisting just to get him to eat a scallop…. Mmmm scallops on top!! In the course of 2 days we didn’t pay for any meals. All of our potential suppliers were more than happy to oblige and each gave a great display of food and hospitality.

Then there was the ‘copy market’. This was awesome. The last supplier that we saw offered to drop us in the city for some shopping. We let him know that we were up for some deals and not the high prices ‘genuine’ retail shops in the main malls. He says “OK, so would you like us to drop you at the copy market?”. These words were music to my ears. After our shopping experiences in Hong Kong and Guangzhou with dodgy guys taking us into little store rooms, I was really amazed that, in Shanghai, they had accepted the fact of copied goods and had named a whole market accordingly. This place was on steroids. Hundreds of little shops, all selling ‘genuine copy’ goods. In the 1^st 10m of entering the copy market, we were asked about 28 times if we wanted “DVD, watch, sexy movie”. I decided that this was going to be some fun so pulled out the Dictaphone on the our mobile phone and recorded about 2 hrs of haggling. I’ll find the time to sit down and cut out the good bits for you at a later date. One of my favourite stalls was the one where the stall owner went birko at another tourist and then directed her abuse toward us. We looked at some sunnies on this chick stand, asked how much, she says something like RMB500, we baulk, a german tourist lady sticks her head in and says they sell for RMB30. The stall owner flared up, ripped into her and finished with my favourite abusive line (imagine the Chinese accent) “you fuk you”. Very entertaining. I’ve got it on audio and will send it out sometime.

Anyway, we spent a good few hours at the copy market, found out their bottom line prices and then bought a few things. We needed a new suitcase for all our purchases, so bought a ‘swiss’ one for RMB160 (AU$30), deon got a great ‘north face’ ski jacket for RMB150 and we bought some other things including, DVD’s, a heap of socks in 3 varieties (20pairs for each of my lovely housemates – our plan is to throw away ALL of our socks and use only the one brand/style each so there is never again any confusion or lost socks in our household {wishful thinking, but worth the exercise}), a pen, some roller skatey things, Barbie doll (for deon). It was pretty tiring, but well worth the experience. We pissed off a few shop dealers as they didn’t make much marking on our purchases, but there’s so many stalls, all you need to do is haggle one down, ask the next one for less, ask the next one for less until you figure their bottom line then buy. I found that asking other stall owners if you got a good deal is a good one, you especially know that you have got a good deal when that shop owner choses not to try to sell you anything. Asking other westerners what they’ve paid is also a good way to get an idea of their bottom lines. Some of my favourite bargaining lines from stall owners include:

“Oooh, your killing me”

“Ok ok ok last price”

“Oh you must be joking… ok ok ok”

dodgy blokes who mumble as u walk past “DVD? Watch?”, like they’re trying to be secretive. Many of them must have gone to McDonalds school of suggestive selling too. Once you puchase they try to sell you something else before you walk out. I particularly liked it when we walked away from stalls and they then chased us down about 30m away from their stall with another “ok ok ok last price”.

Leaving Shanghai was a buzz. We took the Maglev (Magnetic Levitation) train to the airport. This thing was bloody awesome. The Germans designed it about 10yrs ago and Shanghai had some small penis syndrome and had to buy it to flex their muscles and show the world how rich they are. When you see a tosser in a Ferrari driving down the street, you still check out the Ferrari though, don’t you? So we went on this amazing train. I took a couple of pics which don’t show much, but I did manage to video the whole trip on my camera, all 8 minutes of it (20mile trip). Top speed reached was 431km/h! With an average speed of 240km/h. Pretty exciting. It wasn’t as smooth as we expected, but I’m sure it’d be pretty hard to keep anything traveling that fast smooth. Felt much like a standard long distance train (eurpoean… way better than anything Au as got) except for the banking turns. I think there is one other Maglev in USA somewhere, but it would be awesome if there were more of these trains around. Imagine traveling from Mel to Syd in 2.5 to 3hrs, no airport terminals, turbulance or Tulla freeway. Less to Adelaide, but who’d build a train to there anyway.

Am now in Kuala Lumpur. Had a full day with one supplier yesterday. They demonstrated mush better quality and organization than the Chinese, but we are expecting prices to be marginally higher. There’s factors where the Malaysians can’t beat the Chinese such as less regular freight to Aus and apparently they pay about 10% more for steel. Today is my first real day off. Deon left for home this morning and I have the place to myself until I return on Sat. KL is made up of about 60% Malay, 25% Chinese and 8% Indian. The fruit here is awesome, about 6 varieties of mangoes (Danita’s favourite) and a heap of other tropical varieties I’ve never seen before. Like pineapple that tastes like watermelon (ok, it’s yellow watermelon, but had me fooled) and some bizarre prickly fruits which I don’t even know how to eat. It’s Tuesday morning 9am, so I’m gonna head out, see some sights, try to have some adventure without Deon ( I already miss him) and will post again in a few days.

Love you all. Sascha.