Xinh Chao to all you funky monkeys and secret squirrels

Well we are currently in Vietnam which is country number 62 for us and country number 2 for Kitson but instead of pigging out on awesome Vietnamese food which is why we came here, we are currently sitting in the lobby of the the Australian Embassy in Hanoi, since Avril needs to get an emergency new passport.

Now it would be great if we had an awesome travel story like the other girl sitting here who had her passport stolen by row boat pirates who rowed up to her junk in Halong Bay, climbed through her window to steal her passport and then rowed away…

…but NOOOOOOO… we are here because Kitson in a fit of “five fingers of fury baby grip of death rage” ripped the FRIGGIN’ photo page out of Avril’s passport 2 seconds after Avril said “just let her play with the passport…”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggghhhhh! I think I was able to hold back the “I fecken told you so” for all of about 2 seconds… and needless to say Avril has copped ENORMOUS amounts of shit about it ever since…

But anyways, I was hoping to keep this as our usual immature toilet humour travel blog but really, Vietnam has been a pretty basic country to travel through so we haven’t done anything truly adventurous here. So unfortunately the most interesting thing that we can blog about is how we’ve backpacked with a baby. Yep sadly it looks like our intrepid travel blog has now turned into a ‘how to travel with kids travel blog.’

So the main reason for this trip to Vietnam was for the Vietnamese food as we were inspired by a Luke Nyugen an Australian/Vietnamese celebrity chef who kind of looks like me and did an awesome show on the different regional foods in Vietnam. But the second reason was to see if we could still maintain our travel lifestyle with a baby… and to see if Kitson has our travelling superpowers.

…And… Well… all we can say is that backpacking with a baby has certainly been challenging… AND a massively steep learning curve.

So first of all Kitson actually travelled pretty well and she actually handled the time difference, food and the temperature changes way better than us.

Vietnam is a really long country with a wide change in weather patterns and we started in the Ho Chi Minh City in the south which was 34 degrees and so stinkin humid that we headed to Nha Trang a beach town just to escape the heat. Unfortunately we hit the winter monsoons in the old imperial city of Hue in central Vietnam. And we are now in Hanoi where the temp is down to 15 degrees.

We did manage to get out to the famous Halong Bay where those thousands of limestone islands rise out of the water… but that was also pretty miserable in the cold monsoonal rains and really not worth going to in those conditions.

But thankfully we weren’t really that interested in the war history or the scenery… we just came to eat… since Vietnamese food and Japanese food is our 2 most favourite cuisines. And thanks be to Buddha, Kitson handled the food really well too… but unfortunately she is now addicted to noodles and sashimi and we have learnt the hard way that nappies smell twice as bad as normal with fish sauce poos.

Vietnam is also famous for the chaotic mayhem of motorbikes on the streets and it is completely impractical to use a pram, so we mainly have been carrying Kitson around using a Baby Bjorn sling. Now those dumbarsed Swedes really didn’t account for using their slings in hot climates in their design because we got really stinky hot using it… and unfortunately spending a whole day in it actually gave Kitson a bruised vagina… Yee-ouch!

Poor girl… she may have a developed a vaginamite of steel, but luckily her travel Kung Fu is strong.

So far she has survived floating up the Mekong Delta in a dugout canoe and she even survived being crammed like sardines into a ratchety local minibus for 3 hours over the Hai Van pass which is the amazingly beautiful rugged coastal road made famous in a Top Gear episode, so she has definitely proven to have our travel superpowers.

However the hardest thing we found was that because Vietnam is so filthy with pollution and muddy due to the wet weather, and because she can’t walk yet, we had a really hard time holding her back from crawling. Even though I normally tell patients that germs are good to strengthen the immune system, even I got a bit nervous with all the crap on the ground. In the end we had to just let her crawl on the filth and thankfully her immune system handled the rest… Woohoo… Looks like her bacteria fighting Kung Fu is strong too!!!

Now being her parents, we were well impressed with her travel kung fu, but the thing that blew us away the most is that in Vietnam…. Kitson is a FRIGGIN ROCK STAR!!!!!

I FRIGGIN shit you not! Holy crap… we don’t know whether the Vietnamese aren’t used to seeing travellers with babies or whether Kitson was being super charming, but we couldn’t walk down the street without people yelling out “BABY!!!!” and then running up to her to play with her. And of course Kitson really knows how to work it so she was smiling and talking to anyone and everyone. We actually had to be her body guards and keep people off her at times!

The young 20 something Vietnamese who seem to run all the restaurants and hotels are definitely hypo manic and seemed to love kids and even the men would want to pick her up and cuddle her all the time. Initially it was awesome as we could go to any restaurant and they would just take her from us and feed her for us… but eventually it really changed her personality and she became addicted to the attention and she would wail in protest when they tried to hand her back to us… her boring old parents. Feck me… at 12 months we have already become irrelavant in her life :p

Most disturbingly though, is that she became addicted to cuddles by Vietnamese men in uniforms as a lot of the hotels have young doormen who would play with her and she got to the stage that she would actually refuse to go to the Vietnamese women. In fact she is so addicted that she is now grabbing at any asian guy in a uniform on the street including guards and policemen. Man… I found this Asian men addiction to be very disturbing and have now realised that I will have to also keep my Kung Fu strong for when she is a teenager…

Yep… just like in an old 80′s computer game any future boyfriend will have to fight up the ranks until they reach me… the BOSS LEVEL!!! POWER UP DUDE!!!!

So what’s the verdict about travelling with a kid?

Well it really was a completely different travel than we are used to and there were times that we really didn’t enjoy it. But travelling with a baby really opened doors with the locals that we would never had experienced otherwise. And surprisingy people rip you off less and touts hassle you less when you have a kid… and you can jump queues everywhere!

However, I absolutely missed going out and enjoying nightlife too and we found it really tough to provide her with run around time in the middle of a day.

Vietnam itself was awesome for travelling with kids and the people are the most cheerful and fun loving culture that we have come across even more so than the Thais in our book. We also thought that the Vietnamese are the most resilient people that we have come across given their violent past and the street food was simply awesome so we will definitely be back.

All told, I think we picked one of the toughest ages to travel with a baby… but despite it being challenging it was very doable and we are hoping we can still knock some more countries off our travel list before she hits school age.

And in actual fact, going travelling with her has been awesome for getting her… and us… out of bad habits. At home we used to fuss over keeping her to her sleep and eating routines and started revolving our life around her routines. But once we stripped away all the crap of western society and just got into a more nomadic lifestyle, we found that she adapted really well and is now a lot more robust and now only eats when she is hungry and can actually sleep in the middle of a cacophony of motorbikes and car horns on a busy Hanoi street. That alone was worth going on holidays for. Man every parent should go travelling just to make their kids more adaptable!

Anyways, the fecking Australian Embassy told us Avril’s passport would have been ready an hour ago so as soon as we get it we are off to get a new exit visa from the Vietnam Immigration office… FECK… and hopefully we’ll be Hong Kong in a couple of days to herald in the Chinese New Year of the Dragon. And we’ll be back in Australia at the end of the month so Kitson can tell all her playgroup friends that she just returned from her tour of duty in Nam… and scooters still make her jumpy and agent orange cordial burns her to her core…

Snatch you all later. Lotsa love

Ced ‘Luke Nuygen is my clone’ Chu
Avril ‘I thought passports were child proof’ Bowie
Kitson ‘I like men in uniform’ Chu

PS if you are bored our Vietnam pics are at this link
PPS And here is a link to a youtube video from our friend Dom showing how to cross the road in Vietnam… now imagine doing that with a baby

Hey there to all you movers and groovers

Well we left Australia on New Years Eve for a 4 week trip to Vietnam for Kitson’s first backpacking holiday and we’ll finish up in Hong Kong for the Chinese New Year.

But today we are currenty in Hue in central Vietnam and today was actually Kitson’s first birthday.

As you can see from the attached pictures Her royal highness Kitson spent today being crowned The Exultant Empress Kitson the First while in the Imperial City of Hue in Central Vietnam.

Her entourge and humble servants were at her beck and call to do whatever she wanted and feed her chocolate cake. The hotel staff where we are staying also bought Kitson a huge cake but she decided on being a fussy eater so instead her parents went to bed all sugared up.

Anyway the main reason for this email was to send out our late-as-usual Xmas cartoon. It’s been 2 years since our last one but as you can imagine our lives have been dominated by nappies and poo in the last year.

We do apologise for dropping out of social contact over the last 12 months and will definitely endeavour to catch up more in 2012.

We’ll do our formal travel blog soon… although our travel has become decidedly less adventurous since travelling with a baby. But none-the-less in my quest to travel blog from every country in the world, I’ll have to see if there is anything interesting to blog about.

Our contact details are the same for 2012. Avril is still on facebook but can’t seem to access it in Vietnam for some reason. Ced still refuses to use social networking and prefers to remain old-school with email and blogging.

Avril is still selling her glass work on line at 2 sites now

http://dtll.com.au/sellers/avril-bowie

http://www.etsy.com/shop/AvrilBowie?ref=seller_info

www.cedavril.com is still our travel blog site but the wordpress template has buggered up so it may not be working properly.
Otherwise our photos are still on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/cedavril/sets/

Anyways we’ll blog again soon

Ced, Avril & Kitson

Konichiwa movers and groovers and other furry monsters

Well I’m currently sitting in a zen garden in a rural town called Nagahama on the shores of Lake Biwa-ko somewhere north of Kyoto while Avril is off doing a glass course.

And…man… what a lucky find! We completely stumbled upon this really small village, which in the 80’s, to save the town from financial ruin, the locals decided to band together and start an artisan community to attract tourists… And they were so successful attracting millions every year, that the town is now considered a template for how to regenerate a town.

So now the village is only known for 2 things… a glass artisan community called Kurokabe Square… AND… The Kaiyodo Figure Museum, which is dedicated to 40 years of miniature resin figurines, especially of manga and anime characters made by Kaiyodo the leaders in fine sculpting… which is what I am about to start learning to take my cartooning to the next level!!!

HOLY CRAP!!! It’s like this place was COMPLETELY made for the 2 of us!!!! What are the chances of 2 obscure interests being in the sole attractions in 1 town!!! Avril has completely had multiple glass nerdgasms, and I’ve suffered spontaneous human ejaculation ever since we’ve been here in Japan!

Which leads me to the point… WE FRIGGIN LOVE JAPAN!!! …which I’m sure is no surprise to all you many others who have been here too… since EVERYBODY loves Japan!!!

Japan is actually the 61st country that we have been to and considering that I grew up on Astroboy, G-Force, Star Blazers, Monkey Magic, and comic books… I don’t know why we haven’t been here sooner… It is literally the centre of the geek universe!!!

And they have a thriving glass culture here so Avril is also completely in heaven!

Not only that, but everyday, we come across multiple small inventions, or efficiencies, or ideas or simple modifications in day to day things that make us stop and think “That’s so obvious and simple… why don’t we have that at home?”

We’ve seen a shit load of the world so far and I’d safely say Japan is definitely the COOLEST country on the planet! Somehow they have maintained their childlike fascinations with cutesy animals etc, and yet they really have their sh’it together when it comes to having a very efficiently run country while still maintaining a high appreciation of art and aesthetics.

We were actually trying to work out why Japan is so cool and it just seems like everything is cool over here.

They make eating raw fish cool, they make good manners cool, they make shopping cool, they make social awkwardness and geekiness cool, they make game shows cool, they make dressing up in cosplay cool, they make cute animals cool, they make men spending money on hair fashion and grooming cool, they make school girl uniforms cool, they make taking a dump and having a laser targeted jet stream wash your arse cool, they make fat men wearing nappies in a sumo ring cool, they make adults reading comic books cool, they make kinky sex cool, they make suicide harakiri cool…

…and they have NINJAS…

…oh man… SO cool…

Anyways, just when we thought things couldn’t get any cooler… then we find out that when the cities of Kobe (which was devastated in the 1995 earthquake), and Shizuoka, an industrial town needed to bring tourists back to their town… they didn’t just build artisan communities or do advertising campaigns…

NO… what they did was build life sized BIG friggin ROBOTS in their town plazas!!!!

Holy smokes how crazy COOL is that!!!!

… I felt my prostate start to twitch just typing that!!!

Man, if they weren’t into whaling then I’d think of turning Japanese. I’d think of turning Japanese, I really think so!

Now I can hear a chorus of you fan boys screaming “NO way!!!???”

Well… YES WAY!!!! AND… The Gundam’s head moves and smokes blows out of it every 30 minutes!!!

The original life sized Gundam was in Odaiba Bay in Tokyo but it was dismantled after a few months. Fortunately this one was just opened in Shizuoka a short shinkansen ride south of Tokyo. The Gigantor which is known as Tetsujin 28 in Japan has onlt just opened up as well. I really don’t know how long they will be there though. If you are going to Japan and want to see these then I got all my info from these 2 sites.

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/25329/Gundam+Shizuoka.html

http://www.happyjappy.com/kobe/tetsujin-28-go-statue.html

However, the tourism boards in the respective Shinkansen stations will give you maps on how to get there.

So this time if you are bored and want to check out our pics, don’t be too surprised to see a lot of bigarsed robots and hot anime girls.

…um… there’s also some temples there as well, but Kyoto was so full of temples that they bored the zen out of us a bit. Robots and glass beat Buddha hands down any day!

Anyways, we’ll be home this weekend

Thanks to all you funky monkeys for all the well wishes on our pregnancy too. We’ll do some individual replies when we’re settled back at home.

And I know there’s quite a few of you who have been following our travel blogs since we started them 12 years ago in 1998… which we realised was even before the word “blog” existed!!!

Thanks for sticking with us through our cartoonish, irreverent and immature journeys over the last 61 countries… BUT… it looks like Ced & Avril’s Bigarsed Adventure is now officially over:(

HOWEVER… I’m still hoping to get to every country in the world before I die (134 more countries to go), so here’s hoping that having a kid won’t stop that happening, and that me and Avril will still refuse to grow up AND the next Bigarsed Adventure travel blog that you read from us will be Cedavril & Cub’s Bigarsed Adventure!!!

Sayonara
Ced Great Sage Equal Of Heaven
Avril Marshall Of The Heavenly Hosts

PS Oh and the Kaiyodo Museum info is at this link

PPS Thanks heaps to Dom for all the Tokyo tips and thanks to JC for alerting me to the life size Gundam. You guys ROCK!

Konichiwa dudes and dudettes

Well we are currently in Hiroshima chilling out on our tatami mats… and before we start our travel blog we should mention – for those of you who were very astute and picked this up on our Jellyfish video and pictures… Yes… Avril is PREGNANT!!!

HOLY COW and YIKES!!!

Yep… We’re about 24 weeks and due about 17th January and it’s either a baby girl or a boy with a very small p.enis.

We hadn’t announced it until now as we thought it would be cool to see how many people were going to email us to ask us whether Avril was getting pregnant, or whether she was just getting fat.

In any case, no need to congratulate us just yet… we are still in a state of sheer terror and freaked-outness… and we’re not really into gooshy parenting right now as it all sounds a bit too grown up for us. In fact, Avril was planning to simply get a T-shirt made up saying “It’s not a pregnancy… it’s a tumour.”

So anyways, today we went to the A-Bomb Dome at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, where the remains of a building, which was directly under the atomic bomb still stands. The bomb actually detonated about 600m above the ground so the building, which was directly underneath, was in some ways, a little protected from the direct bomb blast radius… although everyone inside was still vaporised due to the intense heat…

Well, we really should have been lamenting in awe about how freaky it was standing right at ground zero for the most famous nuclear bomb explosion in history… but holy cow…  instead we were both wondering if the ground was still radioactive enough to be able to give our unborn child mutant superpowers!!!!

Man… Avril was hoping for a child with the superpower to be able to turn any object into a glass bead, where as I would just be happy if the child could simply transform into a giant reptile with atomic breath and laser eyebeams… I can see we are both going to have very different parenting styles…

So anyhows… Hiroshima is such a COOL city! It has a really awesome vibe and a funky nightlife suburb and is so modern and progressive, it is hard to believe that it was a wasteland only 50 years ago.

In fact it has all the cool shit that you get in Tokyo but with a quaint laidback European flare and it really reminds us of Paris. We could TOTALLY live here.

While down here, we also chilled out at a ryokan (traditional Japanese guesthouse) in the middle of a deer park on Miyajima Island, which is arguably considered “one of the 3 most beautiful sights in Japan.”

Which by the way was most awesome, as it was such a welcome relief from the manic energy of Tokyo.

Man, Tokyo ROCKS and we loved it!!! But friggin hell was it exhausting!

We had a week in Tokyo all up and we did all the normal touristy things but it really punished our feet, our wallets and our stomachs as we shopped and ate way too much.

Avril did actually have a hard time with pregnancy fatigue, but that still didn’t stop her from walking into a hen’tai (prawnographic manga comic) shop and freaking out the slimy Japanese otaku (manga geek nerds) who really weren’t expecting to see a 24 week pregnant gaijin hanging around in the aisles.

In actual fact if anyone visiting Japan is looking at seeing something super quirky in a country that is full of quirkyness, I can recommend visiting a Japanese s’ex shop if you want to freak yourself out.

…8 floors of musty DVDs and the higher you go the more bizarre it gets… But the funny thing is that in a culture that idolises girls in Sailor Moon school girl uniforms, it was no surprise that the granny s’ex section was the floor above the bestiality and scatology section… which was disturbing because it was also the floor which had girls getting off in a tub of octopuses… eeewwwwww!!!

Anyways we are off to Kyoto and Osaka for the next week.

Sayonara
Ced-san
Sailor Avril

PS Our Tokyo and Hiroshima pics are at this link if you are bored. No octopussies though.

Alii to all you friends, family and other smellyfish jellyfish…

So about five years ago we were watching Survivor Palau… which by the way is the only TV series we religiously watch…

…And after one of the challenges, the winners were taken to a natural volcanic lagoon that had risen up millions of years ago from the ocean carrying a heap of jellyfish with it, called Jellyfish Lake.

Well, over the years, with no natural predators, the jellyfish had lost their stingers and multiplied to over 20 million… and obviously one of the WAY COOL things to do is to go swimming in the lake surrounded by a cloud of orange jellyfish just like the contestants of Survivor did.

I remember Avril turned to me and said “Holy Shit!!! We TOTALLY need to do that!!!!” Followed very quickly by me saying “Where the fuck is Palau???!!!!”

So here we are five years later… And HOLY COW we’re currently in FRIGGIN Palau sitting on an exclusive remote beach with no-one else around…

…AND… it’s TWICE as cool since this is ALSO at The North Beach Cottages at the top end of Babeldaob Island where the contestants from Survivor stayed once they were voted off from the game!!!

…interlude while we geek out a bit and run around waving our arms like spackos on the beach…

OK… back to the blog…

So… anyways we now know that Palau is a group of around 300 islands in Micronesia, which is in the Pacific just east of the Phillipines and just west of Guam and about half way between Japan and Australia just off the Equator. And up until the 2 seasons of Survivor that were filmed here, this island paradise was one of the best kept secrets known only to scuba divers and US military personal holidaying from Guam.

We really only came here to swim in Jellyfish Lake, so we were completely blown away by how friggin beautiful Palau actually is.

Man… Palau is an amazing array of islands, reefs, coves, hidden bays and lakes, and the centre piece is an area called the Rock Islands which are cute little islands covered in impossibly thick jungle that pop out of the crystal blue water like little mushrooms.

These islands are protected by a huge barrier reef so the coral is more elaborate and delicate than we have at home in Australia and the underwater life is in much more abundance than we have at home too. We’ve seen manta rays, and 7 foot sharks just while snorkelling and we’ve even seen dugongs here, which we’ve never seen at home.

They actually have reef areas called Shark City and Clam City which have sharks and giant clams all over the place,

So over the last week, we’ve been snorkelling, kayaking and helicoptering all throughout the islands, which has been totally amazing especially since Palau is also known for a lot of WWII history. There are actually Mitsubishi Zero fighter planes crashed onto shallow reef here and the Japanese still have such a strong influence here that most of the restaurants offer tropical fish sashimi which is the freshest we have ever had.

…although we did pass on the other local delicacy which is fruit bat soup… which I was going to try until I was told that you leave sucking on the head and the intestines until last since they taste like chewy peaches…

…oops just threw up in my mouth a bit…

Well, the pics that are attached are an aerial view of the Rock Islands and also Jellyfish Lake, which truly was one of the best wildlife experiences that we have ever had!

The jellyfish follow the sun en-masse and concentrate themselves into a tight cluster called a cloud burst, and you need to swim around the lake until you find them.

We were told that when you see 10 jellyfish keep going… if you see 100 jellyfish keep going… if you see 1000 jellyfish keep going… if you see 10,000 jellyfish you’re probably almost there!!!

It was completely a surreal feeling floating in this hyper green lake with bright orange jellyfish pulsating all around you in different directions.

…and I know I should have been totally in touch with the entire National Geographic feel of it… but with all the Jellyfish bumping off each other in different directions, all I could think of was that it was totally like that 80s arcade game Asteroids!!! Man I’m such a geek…

Anyways, unfortunately we had a super-strict guide who wouldn’t let us swim into the centre of the cloud as they are a bit fragile… but still being on the outskirts was pretty cool too. You can google Jellyfish Lake to see how thick the cloud actually gets.

Well if you’re bored this is the link to our Palau pics with Jellyfish Lake and Clam City.

And if you want to see what the Jellyfish Lake was really like this is a youtube link to a 4 minute video we made with our funky new Sanyo Xacti dmx-ca100 underwater pocket video camera. (Highly recommended as it is a true HD camera too).

And if you are super bored this is the link to the helicopter flight video.

Anyhows, we are off to Japan to bum around for the next 3 weeks so if anyone has some tips for quirky and funky things to do in Japan… then please let us know.

Will probably be in Tokyo for a week and then head south from there to Hiroshima before flying out of Osaka.

Smell ya later

Smellyfish Jellyfish Ced
Bearded Clam Avril

Sunny And Sensible                                 Cloudy And Stupid

Hey there dudes and dudettes.

Well I’m currently in Queenstown in New Zealand with a mate of mine, Darren… and normally I’d be sending a travel blog out about how awesome a snowboarding trip I’m having since there have been a couple of major snow dumps over the week I’ve been here…

…and i’d probably be bragging that I’ve managed to snowboard my first powder runs with amazingly good weather over here…

…however…

This time I’ll let the attached photos speak for themselves… You Have Been Warned! What has been seen CANNOT be unseen! Proceed to the other photos with caution!

Ladies & Gentlemen… Welcome to Ced’s Mankini Snowboard Run on Treblecone 2010…

The photos are here…

You Have Been Warned! What has been seen CANNOT be unseen! Proceed to the other photos with caution!

Ok don’t try this at home unless you have buns of steel. I had frozen dangleberries for hours afterwards.

OK girls put your vibrators down and step slowly away from the computer and nobody will get hurt. Don’t go zooming in. There’s nothing to see. It was very VERY cold. But I bet you are all jealous of Avril getting all this mankini loving!

Holy shit. That’s a long way down skidding on my arse if I fuck this up.

Ah… fuck it here we go!!! By the way, this was a black run called the drainpipe. I have balls of ice and a brown patch where my green patch should be.

…and the video is here…

Lotsa love
Ced

PS …and before anyone rags me out on riding the brakes on the video… that was a black run and until they invent arse transplants… i’m not going any faster than that in a mankini… i’ve already got a brown spot where my green spot should be