Six months ago, we received a cryptic email telling us to be in Hong Kong on December 9, 2006. No further details would be divulged, just be there! Gavin’s 40th birthday celebrations were to be a mystery until we got there, but were not to be missed!

The only other information we had was the dress code from the invitation- “Dress: Up”. So much time and deliberation was put into choosing suitably fancy outfits for what we knew was going to be an amazing night, knowing too that Will & Gavin had put a lot of secret planning into it.

We certainly weren’t disappointed! It was such a fantastic, memorable night. Friends and family flown in from Australia, China and other parts of Asia all met up at JJ’s bar at the Hyatt, before we were escorted from the hotel down to the waterfront of the harbour - whereupon we boarded a luxury yacht and then spent the next four hours cruising around Hong Kong harbour quaffing French bubbles and munching on a divine finger food buffet. Normally people would say “how the other half live”, except this time it was us, and of course we deserved it! And it was an absolutely fitting way to celebrate Gavin’s birthday, suited him to a T.

My brother Geoff and his fiance Deb coming to visit on the 29th October marked the start of a very hectic week of house-guests, entertaining and carrying on for us! All lots of fun of course.

Geoff & Deb have been living in the UK for the past 5 or 6 years but are on their way back home to Australia for good this time - so they’d just spent the previous few weeks selling houses and cars, packing everything up and generally racing around - an experience we can well relate to only having done it a short time ago ourselves. So we didn’t have too strenuous an agenda planned for them but rather thought we’d let them chill out here. Which is pretty much what happened.

Well it was very exciting to welcome them both to our little pad here, partly because we hadn’t seen Geoff at all since visiting him in the UK in 2004 but also because we’d never met Deb before. Happy to report that she’s great and will be a welcome addition to the family - smart and interesting and very enjoyable company. Her and Geoff are all cute and lovey-dovey too which is kind of hilarious.

The very next day we also had Gavin come to stay again so it was full house visitors-wise. The troops busied themselves all during the day visiting Jim Thompson’s house, the Blue Elephant cooking school and Geoff and Deb even did that thing which every tourist is warned not to do - allow the tuk-tuk driver to take you to “his friend the tailor”. I was kind of horrified when I found out but happily it turned out to be a great adventure for them and they were street-smart and well-travelled enough to avoid getting completely stooged.

Gavin kept himself busy at the dentist, as you do….

On the final night when all three were leaving the next day, we had a fantastic dinner at Distil which is right next to the old favourite Sky Bar, a great night and great way to finish off their visit.

Guess we’ll be seeing Geoff and Deb when we’re back in Australia again… unless we can tempt them to come back here again first! Which might not be so difficult after all, I suspect.

In need of a trip overseas for a “visa run”, a trip to Singapore seemed like a fun idea. A nice place it is too, we had a good time.

Good time that is in Singapore, although getting there and our first experience of an Asian low-budget airline left a bit to be desired… I’d forgotten how ruthless Chinese women can be when elbowing you out of the way for a seat. Once we did get the seat, poor Paul’s giraffe legs jammed into the back of the seat in front the whole way. Not very comfortable of course and the warm beer (with ice cubes, how nice) was less than comforting. By the time we’d escaped from the bus-station-esque “budget terminal” at Singapore Airport we were thoroughly scarred - thank god the hotel had sent a Merc to pick us up. I don’t think we would have coped well with trying to find a cab at that point.

Anyway, dramas aside, Bangkok’s fabulous new Suvarnabhumi Airport is a winner and of course a vast improvement over the horrible old one, which someone told me the other day is 97 years old. The upgrade is well overdue obviously! Suvarnabhumi is huge though, bring your rollerskates in carry-on baggage is my suggestion.

We arrived pretty late on Friday night so it was just a quick room-service snack (in lieu of dinner on the plane) and off to bed. Saturday morning though, we hit the ground running and started our Luxe Guide tour of Singapore. We found great shops, interesting food and a couple of stunning art galleries before it was time for refreshments, the obligatory Singapore Slings at the place which started it all, the beautiful Raffles Hotel.

A bit more shopping for the afternoon, although I must say we were very well behaved and really didn’t buy very much, and we headed up to the highest place we could find to check out the view. Well let me say that was hardly very impressive, as Singapore at the moment is covered with a revolting haze (and has been for a couple of months) which is the result of the annual burning-off of vast amounts of forest in Indonesia. Needless to say, the Singapore government (along with Thailand, Malaysia and other impacted countries) is trying in vain to make the Indonesian government put a stop to this; the subject of air quality is front page news in Singapore every day.

Saturday finished up with a trip to Chinatown and lovely dinner and a nightclub which turned out to be a non-event. However we did have one of those wandering-around-in-strange-town midnight adventures instead.

Having had a big day on Saturday, Sunday was a bit quieter. We went for a walk up the street and saw another “Love” sculpture, just like the one we’d found in Tokyo; it turns out there are several of these around the world and the original’s in Philadelphia. Guess we’ll have to make a pilgrimage to all of them one day.

The final pleasure of our Singapore weeked was lunch with friends Richard (who’s now living in Singapore) and Sarah (who happened by coincidence to be in town at the time). Nice to see you both again!

Back to Bangkok and back to work….. ah well it was fun while it lasted!

For the last two-and-a-half weeks we’ve had our good friend Jiin Wei staying with us from Melbourne. And we’ve had such a great time!! Lots and lots of adventures and laughs.

One weekend we made a trip to Bangkok’s Chinatown, which unlike any Chinatowns I’ve experienced before it really was like being in a different country! Took a river taxi (boat) and then visited a flower and fresh fruit market on the way,

fought our way through crowds in markets, ate plenty of tasty street-food snacks and then finally found ourselves a beer at a very strange bar.



Finished off with dinner at a very “rustic” restaurant! Later that night we went for cocktails & jazz at the Sheraton… a very dignified way to finish a very hectic day!

I (Pete) had to work during the week but Paul and Jiin managed to have plenty of adventures so they didn’t miss me too much! One day, a trip to the spectacular Grand Palace:








Another day, Thai cooking classes at the famous Blue Elephant restaurant.









Since Paul and I have been living in Bangkok we’d been hearing about the oh-so-glam Bed Supperclub… we saved the first visit up until Jiin Wei was in town to join us! Fantastic food, amazing venue, great volumes of cocktails, sooo chic. I honestly felt like we had walked into a James Bond movie. Too cool.








Just in case we hadn’t been having enough fun already, the Queen’s Birthday long weekend came up so we took advantage of the occasion to head down to Koh Samui for a bit of a break. Things did not start well when the normally-40 minute trip to the airport took over 3 hours due to the pre-holiday traffic jam. Luckily we’d allowed way too much time for the trip but still had to run to catch the plane! Very stressful I must say - fortunately the only thing that went wrong for the whole weekend, so we were lucky there.

We were staying at the oddly-named Big John resort, a cheap-and-cheerful place right on the beach. An old friend of Jiin Wei’s, Ed, had been travelling in Thailand at the time also and joined us for the weekend.








It turned out that on our second night at the resort a couple was getting married right there on the beach. Well after a few drinks and when they’d all finished up for the night we couldn’t help but take advantage of their setup:



I think all that tropical air must have been going to our heads……



When we finally made it back to Bangkok there was only a day or so left before both Jiin and Ed had to go home… on the last night we celebrated Jiin’s 30th birthday a couple of days early at the fantastic roof-top Vertigo restaurant - outdoors with a bird’s eye view over Bangkok. Spectacular and with food to match. Finished up with drinkies at another rooftop venue, the spectacular Sky Bar. (Any of you who read this and come to visit, we promise to take you too! It’s awesome.) It was a great way to finish up what had been a great couple of weeks.








Thanks for coming to visit us Jiin, we had a ball! Glad to know that you did too. Come back soon!

xoxoxoxoxo

So no sooner had we moved in to our new apartment, it was time to go off on holidays for two weeks! Not actually a bad thing after the stress of the last few months, and the fact that it would be another two weeks before our shipment of household stuff arrived from Australia. The apartment didn’t really have much in it!

Our good friends Alice and Steve were getting married and people have travelled from all over the world for the wedding in Phuket. How convenient that we’d just moved to Thailand!! But before heading there, we went to Koh Lanta for a “pre wedding-holiday holiday” with a smaller number of people.

So we flew into Krabi airport and two hours and two car ferries later we arrived at Rawi Waren resort - brand new, top notch and completely devoid of any guests apart from ourselves! Fantastic, there’s nothing like having your own private resort. Of course the place soon got nicknamed Rabbit Waren since the proper name is too much of a tongue-twister.

The resort was beautiful of course, except for some reason they decided that a “Tom Yum Martini” would be a good thing. I thought it would be a good thing too, until I tried one. If you ever have the opportunity, don’t.

Basically spent the next few days there hanging around the pool, a well earned break.

The only bad thing which happened was an impromptu, and unwelcome, “caving” adventure. We’d hired motorbikes and were buzzing around the island, as you do, and decided to visit a famous local cave. We imagined this would be a case of ride motorbike to carpark, get off and look at cave for a while, get back on bike 5 minutes later. Well, after a 20 minute vertical hike through jungle to get to the entrance of the cave we were stuffed already, and still hadn’t seen any cave. Wondering if this is a good idea? We’d been issued with torches, which hung around our necks, and were shown how to turn them on - twist these two wires together. Great.

The important part of this story is that we’re still alive, although we wondered about that at the time. Two hours in the dark squeezing through muddy gaps in rocks, slipping down rickety bamboo ladders and having very, very close brushes with claustrophobic panic. The worst thing is there wasn’t even anything good to see when we were in there! A little stalactite or something would have been nice but these were the blandest caves known to man.

Never mind though, the rest of our stay on Koh Lanta was wonderful. A day or so later we went off on a 4-island cruise on a boat we’d chartered, which was a great day. We went snorkeling, swam into a magnificent cave (in sharp contrast to the earlier one!) and had lunch on a beach. Even the boat ride itself was great, cruising along on the flat-as-a-tack Andaman Sea, watching the islands go by and thinking, “This is the life.”