Land of Tesco's

So this wasn't ment to be my first thought for the blog, but there are Tesco's everywhere!
So we're back in Asia now. Started in Singapore which is an amazing city, it is clean, sparkly and has loads of fancy buildings, some colonial and some chinese. Singapore seems to be mainly a chinese city/state with the Chinese making up around 70%of the population. We stayed outside the centre, so our area wasn't so sparkly but was good fun. Whilst there we were proper tourists. We went on an open bus ride, up on the Singapore flyer (which aT 165M beats the London eye by 30m) and also on a boat ride. Singapore has shops galore- more than i think i have seen anywhere else.
Also it is ment to be the food capital of the area. Unfortunatly I think that I made some bad choices as my food wasn't that good. They have a thing for frogs, frog porridge, frog porridge with chilli, ginger frog porridge etc. I didn'[t have frog!
So I thought I'd have an icecream safe bet. NO what i thought was vanilla was DURIAN. AGGHHHHHHHHHH wondered why the ice cream man had a smirk.

We are now in Malaysia. Whata diference to Singapore. THis country is a muslim country and has a totally different vibe. There are a lot more indians here and also a lot of Eurasians due to the portugese infulence in the 15th centurary. This means that the arcitecture is really varied with ancient chinese temples next to HIndu temples turned into mosques. Again really impressive.
Have found the food here to be excellent- really good curries and noodles for breaky.
will up date soon promise.
woo hoo out of OZ

Forgotten Children

So after that rant I'll start another one.

When we got here the Australian PM was appologising to the forgotten children of Australia.

Turns out our stupid government and the Ozzies stupid government thought it was a good idea to sent orphans and children from 'deprived' backgrounds to Australia to add to the population and also to gain a better outlook in life.

Turns out that this didn't happen and the children were used as slaves on farms and given the most basic of educations- most of them leaving school under the banner of retarded when they were doing perfectly well at home. To make this even worse the children's parents were sold this better life story and even told they could get their children back if they liked (this wasn't the case). This happened from the 30's till the late 60's. Even though some of these establishments were condemmed by the British government they still let children go out there.

If your interested there is a pretty good book about it all called 'The Forgotten Children' which is a good read but also really eye opening.

Anyway less of the rants- What have we been upto?

Well...

We have travelled from the rock back to Adelaide on the worst flight ever. Don't know why it was horrid but after 26ish years of flying, on my birthday, I decide that this is a horrid flight and get sweaty palms and inwardly panic all the way though it.

Like I said it was my birthday and all I wanted to do after the horrid flight was to get a bottle of vino and drink it- shouldn't be hard.

So couldn't find an offy anywhere and so went for an extortionate priced pint. Wasn't happy. Took Ben till midday to realise it was my B-day. Anyway on leaving the pub in a foul mood we went back towards the hostel crossing a road- WITH NO CARS ON IT.

A car pulls up infront of us a coulple of mins later and says, "what do red lights mean to you?" so I say "red light district" not realsing that it was a copper in an unmarked car. Stupid me, he proceeded to give us a bolloking for crossing the road with out the red light and then he went. ARSE.

Since then we have flown, quite happily may I add, to the Gold Coast (of corrupt coppers) and then caught the Greyhound bus up north. Been To Brisbane, Noosa (which is a lagoony place and quite beautiful) Rockhampton, through loads of floods, Airlie beach where we went out to the Great Barrier reef and went sailing around the Whitsundays, Townsville and we are now in Cairns.

The weather has been erratic and varied from blasing to torrential flooding. When we went to the Barrier Reef it was raining on land but when we went the 100km to the reef it was gorgeous sunshine. On the Greyhound bus one evening we couldn't see the road as there was approx 1m deep flood water and all you could see was trees and water all around.

So we're in Cairns till the 18th and then we move on north to Singapore and into South East Asia. Yippie.

Toodle Pip.

On from Ularu

So since leaving Ularu and the big ol' pebble we went on to Alice springs- just to let you know that this seems a lifetime ago- and in to alleged civillisation again.
Lets just say Australia has lots of problems. For a start there is a complete lack of respect for law in the outback. Yes I know this is the outback but there have been instances of people blowing up the police HQ because they didn't like the rossers interfering with there lives. Yes the outback the place where until a couple of years ago you could still buy explosives alongside you milk and bread. Whilst on the lines of corrupt Ozzy life if you are interested look up current corruption in queensland police. The sunshine and goldcoast police are in the shite for corruption, drug dealing and drinking confiscated liquor down in the police HQ.
Anyway back to the point- Alice springs has a large Aboriginal population- some of these people only came in contact with forigners bout 40 years ago and still refer to the time before trousers. The Australian 'white' people have treated the aboriginal people like shit and there fore these people haven't been intregrated into society v. well. They have food coupons and housing provided and still use the bush as a source of food, life etc and so the majority don't have jobs and sit about not doing anything all day (I don't think the 'white'people want to employ them either). It's a bit depressing. They have low literacy rates, bad health care and are generally left to their own devices. This is all in a westernised country as well. It was all a bit uncomfortable. Money running out will continue later ......