Christmas in Oz

Christmas and New Year seem like a long time ago now - part of a different chapter in my life, experiences had by a different kind of Ollie. I'm not being melodramatic - things really have changed since then.

I'm no longer the selfish and hedonistic young man who would sleep all day and party all night, stumbling through life and love and friendship without a care for anything or anyone. Like a machine on autopilot caught in a loop going round and round in circles. Experiencing everything but not learning anything.

Okay, so maybe I am being a bit melodramatic. I do take myself far too seriously sometimes.

It's like this: Over the last six weeks, life on the road and coming to terms with the end of my free time has taught me a thing or two about the nature of travelling. You regress then you progress.

In the last six months I think it's safe to say that I've regressed. I lost my sense of responsibility. I had a fine old time but I hadn't really achieved anything useful by the end of it, except perhaps to begin to perceive this new kind of self-awareness. The funny thing is that I needed this. I needed to regress before I was ready to progress - as we all do. You cannot really progress your life by being mature and grown up all the time, by piling responsibility on top of responsibility, pressure on top of pressure - by just coping and thus allowing that steel spring inside your soul to wind itself a little bit tighter.

Well, now is the time for progression. Now is the time to take this knowledge and build something with it. It's time to produce something, to do something worthwhile, to give a little bit back. I'm not talking about words on a page or on a website. I'm talking about growing up - but in the right way.

I will of course, with alarming and embarassing honesty, let you all know how I get on in this new and exciting endeavour.

Enough of the deep shit, here are the pictures. If you only look at one of these then make it the sunset on the last day of the year.


First day in Sydney

Our first sight of the opera house and harbour bridge

The city and the gardens

Opera house #1

Opera house #2

Opera house #3

Docklands


Ferry ride

Ferry across to Manly #1

Ferry across to Manly #2

Ferry across to Manly #3


Christmas Day

(Some of) our Christmas Day crew

Santa Claus

Santa's little helpers

Steve, Robin and Dave

Anne, Beth and Fran

Drunken self portrait


New Years Eve

New Year's Eve crew

Me and Steve on New Year's Eve

Sunset on the last day of the year

Illustrious Asia

As I travelled round Vietnam and Cambodia, I started to take an interest in some of the more unusual designs and illustrations we saw on the streets, some of them political slogans, others advertising everything from dentists to body building clubs . Some of the more unique and colourful images are compiled here. I hope these pictures will give you a sense of Asia that you wouldn't necessarily get from photographs of more typical subject matter - such as temples and street scenes. However, in some of these pictures you still get Steve and I beaming typically in the foreground!


This political advertistment was translated for me by a pretty young girl called Trang who worked in a restaurant Steve and I spent some time in (in other words, got hammered in) while we were in Saigon.

Peace, Friendship, Co-operation, Development


Trang's English was not so great so she wasn't able to translate these next two for me.

Political design #1

Political design #2


Wow! This tough guy certainly looks like he works out!

Body building


A familiar sign throughout South East Asia.

Temple


Steve and I spent forty dollars shooting guns in Vietnam - pretty expensive at one dollar a bullet. I shot ten rounds from a M-60 big ass machine gun. Steve favoured an M-16 assault rifle, pump action shotgun and a Colt 45 revolver. We shot at conventional targets (and missed) rather than, as urban myth might suggest, at livestock.

Shooting range



During my last few days in Thailand, the filling I'd got just before I left England started giving me grief, and as I travelled around Laos and Vietnam I lived in terror that it would get so bad that I would be forced to visit a local dentist. I thank my lucky stars I didn't have to visit this dentist, who practiced in a village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, near The Killing Fields.

Dentist #1

Dentist #2



I don't know the translation for this one, but I guess it's fairly self-explanatory.

School is good


This was sprayed on a wall next to the mosque by the lakeside in Phnom Penh.

Grafitti


While visiting the temples of Ankor in Cambodia, Steve and I sat down to a lunch of our staple chicken fried rice, Coca Cola (Steve) and Sprite (me). We were immediately set upon by a variety of locals, hawking their usual useless wares - postcards, trinkets, tiny statues of Buddha. I wasn't interested, until one of the ladies started showing me her range of unique cigarette packets. One design caught my eye in particular, and I was compelled to buy some.

Cigatette packet front

Cigarette packet back