somewhere over the rainbow

Blogging fail!!!

What a rotten blogger I am!

 

So clearly I survived the Cook Islands, apart from getting really, really sick on the way back to Australia - spent my entire stopover in Auckland on the floor of the toilets.  Rarotonga was beautiful, shame the weather was only nice for half the time I was there.  Sooo expensive and definately a honeymoon destination - but I'm glad I went!

 

Eleven weeks (but who is counting!) until my next holiday - I have just over a week off and I am flying up to Beijing for a few days to see Dan who is now living over there as a teacher and then to Boracay Island in the Phillipines for the rest of the week - will probably have a day in Singapore as well - funny that I have been there probably a good fifteen times, much like Kuala Lumpur, and have never done a sightseeing tour except for the first time that I went there when I was 16!  Also thinking of splurging and staying at the Marina Bay Sands but will wait and see if I can get an agent rate on that - I refuse to pay full price of $400 a night!  I'm very much looking forward to this.

 

Rumour has it that I have a conference to go to in Bali in September for work - it will be nice to stay somewhere a little better than the qualityI am used to in Bali!  Also a good excuse to party!

 

I have flights and accommodation held in for Rio Carnivale next year which is exciting - am still scheming and planning to spend a few months over there - will see what the financial advisory comes up with over the next few weeks - have found a cruise that I would really love to go on for my 30th next year, it goes to Jamaica (!) and Grand Cayman (!!!) and isn't too expensive for a single berth.  I had looked into going to Tahiti but it's just beyond expensive - only reasonable if you're on a cruise from say Hawaii to NZ or Australia.

 

Mum, Sarah and I are going to go up to Hamilton Island for a long weekend sometime soon - sad that apparently I have some of the bestislands and beaches virtually on my doorstep and I've never seen them, or snorkelled on the Great Barrier Reef!

 

I hate the trickiness of Typepad - I wish Vox still existed!  There are not enough hours in the day to mess around making this blog look pretty!

Two weeks!

Just over two weeks until I go to the Cook Islands for five days!  The weather is looking nice and warm over there and my parents have just bought me a Kindle for my  birthday so I'll be loading that up with a few cheap e-books from Amazon, lying on the beach and reading for a few days!

Aaaand next countdown!

Going to the Cook Islands on May 24 for five glorious sunny days!  Can't wait!

Livingstone I presume

Wow, Victoria Falls is HUGE and wet and lots of steam comes off it.  Photos are, well, interesting.  Hard to capture water when it's just steam.  It's also really loud!  When I arrived on Friday I flew it over it - that's probably the best view of it to be honest - today I went to both the Zambian side and Zimbabwean side to take a look.

 

Apart from that - yesterday I went to Botswana for the day, for a day of game park driving/cruising in Chobe National Park.  We got incredibly (scarily) close to lions and elephants and babboons on the game drive and on the cruise, we were on these little low boats and we got super close to hippos and I got scared we'd upset them and they'd try and tip the boat but thankfully they didn't.

 

Tomorrow is my last tin shed airport and I'll be in Johannesburg, staying with my friend Marli, before I leave on Tuesday afternoon to fly back to Australia.  I think we are going out to dinner with some of her friends.   Funnily enough I've not been terrified anywhere in Africa...Nai-robbery felt fairly safe, Cape Town was not dodgy at all, even crossing into Zimbabwe today for a few hours was fine, Livingstone is a bit dodgy but that's only because every second person wants to see you a trillion doller Zimbabwean note...but Jo'burg really scares me!  I've heard such terrible stories about it, although when you think about it, there's dodgy spots in every city in the world and I've survived an awful lot of them. 

 

Really sad to her about Japan and also Christchurch (again) a few weeks ago - us humans have really messed up this planet with all the mining and chemicals and overproduction and overconsumption.    Even the Dalai Lama is giving up.

Cape Town, part 2

So sad to be leaving Capetown in the early hours of tomorrow morning - this is a great little city, so much to see and do!  I've been to Robben Island and seen Nelson Mandella's cell and chatted to an ex political prisoner, spent a day wine tasting out at Stellenbosh (I really tried to like red wine, god I tried!), been to the Cape of Good Hope and a penguin colony to get up close with penguins, caught up with my friend Nadia, saw "Black Swan" at the cinemas (it was weird) and eaten out at some very nice restuarants for very little money.

 

Early tomorrow morning I am flying back to Johanessburg and then out to Livingstone, Zambia, for three nights.  Hopefully I can tee up a day trip into Chobe National Park as well as seeing Victoria Falls.  I'm lead to believe that the best viewing of the falls is on the Zimbabwe side but apparently that means I'll need to get a mutiple entry visa for Zambia which is incredibly expensive.  I will ask the people at immigration tomorrow to see what they suggest.

 

It's a shame it has taken so long for me to really feel like I am on holiday - lesson learnt, my next holiday is definately going to be the fly-and-flop kind where I don't try to organise too much in a short amount of time.  I can't believe this time next week I'll pretty much be home (and back at work, and very jet lagged).  I've waited so long to have a decent break from work and now it's gone by way too quickly!  All illnesses seem to have disappeared but still taking the cough medicine.  A because it tastes like strawberries and cream lollies and B because whatever was making me wheezy needs to stay away.

 

According to my stats on this blog I've had eight viewings today!  Who on earth is bothering to read this?