Port Melbourne, Australia - 11th December 2013 to 2nd January 2014

And away from South East Asia we go. A brief stopover in Kuala Lumpur, which takes the honour of least charming airport on the planet, and a spot of lunch in a particularly unsanitary airport café, and we are off Down Under!

The first thing we do on landing is enjoy a nice cup of coffee in Melbourne airport. It's the first good cup of coffee we've drunk in 4 months, and it is beautiful. We'll later discover that Melbourne is a city built on amazing, single origin, hipster coffee places. It's almost like discussing the weather in England, everybody has a favourite place, tucked in a little laneway, impossible to find, that serves the greatest coffee on earth. It says a lot that Starbucks and their ilk have failed miserably in their attempts to break into Australia, and the sheer quantity and quality of coffee places is the reason their few franchises sit empty. For me, this alone would have made me love Australia.

We hop into a cab, and away to the AirBNB booking we made a few weeks before, a very nice modern flat, seconds from the beaches of Port Melbourne, 2 miles south of the city. Our hosts are a very nice couple from New Zealand, though prone to single syllable answers, and have a lovely, hyperactive dog, Bonnie. Regrettably, thanks to the aforementioned grubby café at Kuala Lumpur, we spend the first night in their bathroom, taking it in turns to suffer the indignity of one last bout of the South East Asian Squits, which is not quite the introduction to our roomies we had hoped for!

The CBD, seen from our street

Thanks to overspending in Asia, we were particularly poor over our time in this end of Australia, so we were living on quite a small budget- about 50 bucks a week! Luckily, Ben got a job for a few days running up to Christmas, packing Game of Thrones and Doctor Who merchandise for a supplier of geek ephemera, which got us a couple of Christmas presents, and helped us lay down the rent on our next place! We also got to wander around a lot, and Port Melbourne is (the name is a giveaway) right next to the sea, so we had a few runs along there, and enjoyed the beautiful scenery.

Port Melbourne beach

We also liked to wander down to Albert Park. The joy of the sheer amount of land Australia has, is that they can really push the boat out with the size of their parks, it's huge. They have the F1 Grand Prix there in January, which might give you an idea of quite how long it takes to walk around. It also has black swans, a lake big enough that they were having a sailing competition on it, and just a whole lot of lovely scenery.

Albert Park

As a Brit, you also can't help but notice that the roads are so much wider. Everywhere feels spacious and open, even in the city, and weirdly, the sky just looks bigger.

Federation Square and St Paul's Cathedral

We also explored town, and were very impressed, having come from London, at how organised Melbourne city is. It's laid out in an even grid from end to end- you would have to try very hard to get lost here. The main centre around the GPO was decorated all Christmassy, and this is comforting- because it's the middle of the summer, Aussies seem not to go quite as mad as we do for Christmas.

Christmas Square. Genuinely...

Our AirBNB hosts invited us out for an 'Orphans Christmas', as they are away from their family in Melbourne too, which is, as per what every Brit expects, a barbeque in the park, with some beers! Christmas day is boiling hot, and the park in St Kilda is packed with people celebrating Christmas in the sun, playing cricket and 'footy' (AFL, not the proper one!), and in one corner, a large contingent of travelling Brits from the 'Barmy Army', the devoted followers of the English cricket team, over for the Boxing Day test at the MCG. We eat plenty of snags (sausages), chicken and a not entirely pleasant traditional New Zealand onion dip. Then, for the New Year, we go down to the banks of the Yarra river to watch the fireworks, have a few drinks, decide it's far too crowded, and watch them from our balcony, with a few glasses of rum, and Channel 9's The Project on in the background (it's much like The One Show in the UK, except genuinely funny and interesting.)

A firework, from our balcony. The low light setting on my camera is pants

The following day, we have to start packing up to make our next move. From the professional's paradise that is Port Melbourne, to the edgy, hipster and biker den that is Brunswick. Exciting!

Pad Thai Black Mu - Pad Thai with Black Pudding

 A couple of brief asides from the travelogue, I'm posting these two as a reminder of how good the food was over there. Both are slightly Westernised versions of South East Asian dishes, and are delicious, to my mind. I write more food stuff at my personal blog, Antipathti, if you fancy a read.

 

 

The ironey black pudding cuts through the sweet and bitter tamarind quite nicely, and I quite like the very eastern meeting the very western. Mmm.

Ingredients

• Tamarind
• Soy or fish sauce
• Brown sugar
• Chilli (fresh or powder)
• Salt
• Spring onions
• Flat white noodles
• Black pudding
• Egg
• Peanuts (smashed up)
• Lime

Method

Serves one.

In a little bowl, mix up about 1 1/2 tsp tamarind, 1tsp soy or fish sauce, 1tsp sugar, and salt and chilli to your own preference and taste. It will smell and taste crap. It transforms when cooked.

Chop up the spring onions and pack pudding and stir fry in a fairly tasteless oil, veg or ground nut for a couple of minutes. Add the noodles and the sauce you made and stir fry for a couple more. Add the egg and stir it all quickly so the egg cooks into everything.

Dump it in a bowl and sprinkle over the smashed peanuts and a squodge of lime. Eat with chopsticks if you're pretentious.

Laap Neua, or Lao beef salad

 

A couple of brief asides from the travelogue, I'm posting these two as a reminder of how good the food was over there. Both are slightly Westernised versions of South East Asian dishes, and are delicious, to my mind. I write more food stuff at my personal blog, Antipathti, if you fancy a read.

 

Or larb, or larp, or laab. Bless the confusion of translating from a foreign alphabet to the western. Etymology aside, this is one of my favourite meals in the world. This version came close to the delicious flavour when I've had it cooked for me, and has the advantage of taking about 20 minutes, with very little prep.

The mix of herbs is delicious, and makes up a huge part of the dish. I have made this with strips of steak. Traditionally it would be minced beef (or pork, chicken, white fish or any other deceased animal) but I like the steak strips as a little westernisation of the meal.

If you have an extra 10 minutes, dry fry a small handful of rice before you start, grind it up in a pestle and mortar, and add this to the pan too for extra authenticity. It's called Khao Kua and is a big thing in Southeast Asian cuisine.

Ingredients

Ingredients are per person

• Frying Steak
• Spring onions
• Bird eye or other small powerful chilli
• Mint- A large bundle torn into big chunky pieces, insofar as leaves can be chunky
• Thai/holy basil- A big handful again, roughly chopped. You can get it in Waitrose or Asian food shops. It's sweeter than normal basil.
• Coriander- a handful, roughly chopped
• Lime- juice and grated zest of half
• Nam Pla (fish sauce) 1 tsp
• Chilli sauce- 1tsp and use sweet chilli if you like
• 4 or 5 large whole lettuce leaves, to serve.

Method Chop the spring onion and chilli finely and cut the beef into thin strips. Chop the herbs as well to save panic later.

Railay Bay- 7th-10th December

Railay Bay has no roads, and can only be reached by longtail boat. Our final stop in Thailand is here, and we hop on one round to the bay.

We get there, and after getting a little lost, we find our hotel. On the way, however, monkeys are running around the rooftops. This makes the entire trip! As this is our final stop in Asia, we treat ourselves to a really nice hotel, with a rooftop pool overlooking the sea. It is absolutely brilliant for laid back relaxing, and the view is spectacular.

Railay is another tiny space, with one beautiful sandy bay on one side, with a few shops and restaurants up a little track, and on the other side, a stony tidal dock, with trees growing out of the water, and a little warren of grubby bars and cafes blaring out reggae. There are actually three main bays, with one North or South of the central bay, a short journey by kayak either way. You can also kayak out to the rocks out at sea, where travellers stack stacks of stones above the tide line, as a little permanent marker of having been here. We did this- you have no idea of the height of these limestone cliffs until you look up from the foot of one of these monolithic beasts- sadly, water + camera= no photos!

The little restaurants on the front are lovely too, and we ate some of the nicest and largest meals of our time here, and watched people letting paper lanterns up into the sky. As we leave to get the boat and taxi to Krabi airport, it is with a heavy heart- we've seen so much beautiful stuff while here, eaten so well, met lovely people, it was gorgeous (apart from maybe Ayutthaya).

Ao Nang- 4th-7th Devember

So another boat trip from Ko Phi Phi to Ao Nang. Uneventful, save for the very end, where we have to jump a good meter and a half over water with 20kg backpacks on, because the walkway on our boat has broken! Cheeky tuk tuk drivers try to get us to pay for a bus we had already arranged, warning us that we may be entering the realm of the tourist once more.

Ao Nang is a little more touristy- the following videos we shot show you what to expect of an evening, all from our first night, where we got pleasantly toasted and had Indian food- you miss it while you're away from the UK! A reggae band, a fire eater, and a police car playing Manu Chao kept us amused, along with the usual buzz of offers from shopkeepers.

The next day was all about relaxing, save for an hour we spend writing postcards, and Christmas cards in time for them to get there on time (ish). Ao Nang is beautiful, with it's enormous craggy cliffs, and it's beach with longtail boats zipping off all day long.



In the evening we wandered the shops and found an amazing all you can eat place, with barbecued meats and a mix of Thai and Western food- after 3 months it was nice to have the option of a break from chilli and Nam Pla (fish sauce).
But by and large our time was spent enjoying the beach, with cold beer and fresh fruit, knowing our Asian adventure was nearly at an end, and soon we would be in Australia, and (oh no!) having to work.


Ao Nang was a very nice town- massively busy and touristy. And so for our final stop before our flights to the next country, we wanted to go back to a little bit of remote paradise, just up the coast, at Railay Bay.

Phuket Town and Ko Phi Phi- 2nd-4th December

Hop on a bus at the side of the road outside the 7 eleven and we're on our way to Phuket. After getting the impression that the resort towns are very... resorty, we elect not to go to them, and check in at a little hotel in Phuket Town, with a cute but spatially limited room. Phuket Town is a little grey and dreary, though Chinatown and the parks are very pleasant. You can see why most farangs use it as a changeover and little else, but having stopped here, you can see that the Thai let their guard down here, and are less interested in selling to you, and more interested in why you're here. Unfortunately this means we have nearly no photos!



Jenny and I fancied seeing a film and so we went to the cinema. They're much like English cinema's, except you can afford popcorn and a beer without selling a kidney, and brilliantly, you have to stand up for the King's Anthem. Made us feel very British, ironically.

The next day we booked a ferry out of town to Ko Phi Phi, and ate and drank our way around town. The highlight was a fusion restaurant owned by a Thai guy who'd been living in Australia for the past 15 years. He was lovely and chatted away to us over a few beers about how much we were going to enjoy it there, and we told him how much we were already loving it here. The food was great too! We also saw our first Christmas tree, which made us a little homesick, but happy. The next day, we hopped on the ferry and made our way to Ko Phi Phi, where everyone ever will tell you is where they filmed The Beach. We also saw the island from The Spy Who Loved Me which was very cool. [ On arrival, they make you pay 20B upfront to clean up after you, which speaks ill of the tourists who visit. Then the town itself is no more than 150m wide, with a beach either side, a little warren of wood and sand, with all the basic amenities, food, beer and such, and again, very few motor vehicles. It's very crowded, but it looks idyllic, and we spent our time here lounging on the beach and enjoying the beauty of the area. Little more to say, save for that it was a lovely pit stop, and I'd recommend it to any visitor.

Bang Niang and Khao Lak- 26th November to 1st December

So, back to the mainland. We had seen a bit of heaven, could anything match up? The answer is yes (at times). a coach down the coast takes us to Bang Niang. The area was one of the very worst hit by the 2004 tsunami, and the town is still in the process of putting itself back together- the pavements were still being laid about a mile in, and they have drydocked a police boat where it landed on the day, about a mile and a half from the sea. The whole town is newly built, and whenever you realise this, the memory of what people have been through hits you hard.

That said, it is a beautiful seafront, and the first night, we ate in a nice restaurant at the top of the bay, sat at a table so close to the sea you can literally (actually literally, not figuratively) touch it. The days are spent lounging on the beach, enjoying the 5km of uninterrupted sand and bar.

In the evenings, we visit the night market, where the grill stalls are immense, although Ben tried a noodle sausage which was texturally unique and somewhat confusing when you expected meat! One evening, we looped down to the far end of the beach, via a roadside food hut, and made our way back along the 3 miles of beach, darting into little bars all the way back to town, by which point we are very merry. Halfway down the beach, our way is cut off by a river outlet- unlike in Koh Phayam, we don't have to wade through, as an enterprising bar owner had set up a shuttle raft, at 10 baht (20p) a go. I imagine he makes a lot of money from this! We also hear a lot of 90's reggae in the bars, Big Mountain's version of Baby I Love Your Way being a personal highlight! We eat from a streetside barbecue, delicious satay kebabs and squid.

The next day, we move about a mile down the road to Khao Lak, where a badly insect infested room earns us an upgrade to a high end hotel- very nice! We spend the day on free beachside loungers, in a tree lined peaceful corner of the beach. Huge waves make swimming exciting, and we drink from freshly fallen coconut shells. Both ends of the culinary scale are reached, as Ben eats a double Big Mac (four burgers!) for lunch, and a Northern 'Jungle Curry' for dinner, which is the hottest thing he had eaten for ten years, when an error in an Indian restaurant led to his being served a vegetable phall, and politeness kept him from sending it back! The flavour and tender beef makes the agony and sweat well worthwhile, and we get ready to depart for the isle of Phuket the next day.