Sydney, Australia

Hello. Rover here.

About two weeks after Groundhogs Day, we left from Bangkok and flew to Australia. It was a long flight! We actually landed in the Phillipines for a couple hours before taking off again and flying to Australia. I asked Uncle Jim if I can count The Phillipines on my list of countries that I've visited. He thinks that you have to at least leave the airport for it to count. I had already been to fourteen countries and The Phillipines would have been my fifteenth, but I guess Australia will have to count as my fifteenth.

So, we landed in Sydney, which is the biggest city in the country. It's the one with the big white shell shaped opera house and it's also where the Olympics 2000 were held. We were looking to pick up some wheels.

They have a car market there where travellers can buy cars filled with camping equipment. You can buy a car, use it for a few months and then sell it to somebody else, and as long as nothing goes wrong with the car, you get almost all of your money back. I am pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but Uncle Jim plans on actually selling the car for a profit!

So, after a few days we found a great car, had it inspected, bought it and drove off to a different floor of the parking garage. I asked Uncle Jim how we could afford it and he mumbled something about "cutting other corners", and something about "souvenirs".

Next, we went to the aquarium. We learned lots of things there, like the difference between a crocodile and an alligator. If you see one, you can look at the teeth. For an alligator, you can only see one set of teeth, going down. For
a crocodile you can see teeth going both up and down.

Next, we saw a duck billed platypus. Actually, we saw two, but I don't know what the plural of "platypus" is. They are strange animals and only live in Australia. They have hair like a mammal but they lay eggs. Here I am with a platypus.


Next we saw a display on the Great Barrier Reef, which we are going to visit. This is the place that Finding Nemo was based on. Then we saw sharks and got real close to one shark. My favorite fish was the pufferfish.

That's pretty much all we did in Sydney. Went to the aquarium.... and got some wheels.

Vietnam

Hey folks, Rover here. I know it's been a long time since I've updated, but we've been running all over Southeast Asia for the last three months. I think the last place I talked about was Laos.

Well, from Laos, we went to Vietnam. We took a bus all the way from Pounsavan (in Laos) to Vinh and then immediately went to Hanoi, which is the capital of the country. Vietnam is a really neat place. You see a lot of people wearing cone-shaped hats and most people ride around on bicycles or motorscooters. It was always scary crossing the road because there are no traffic signals. At intersections, drivers from both sides just go straight into the intersection and weave to avoid each other. It took us a while, but we eventually learned that if you wanted to cross the street, you had to just walk out into traffic and move slowly but steadily and the motorscooters would swerve to avoid you. It was scary at first, but we got used to it.

We had a nice time in Hanoi. One neat thing about it was that each street seemed dedicated to selling only one type of thing. There was one street where everyone was selling shoes, and one street where everyone was selling musical instruments. We found one street full of shops that made custom-carved wooden stamps. Uncle Jim had one made for me, and here is a picture of him with the stamp maker. If you look close at the white paper bag, you can see the stamp. The man drew a picture of me and carved it into wood and we got it back in just a couple of hours and it cost less than two dollars!

From Hanoi we headed east to Halong Bay. The bay is famous for being filled with big turnip shaped mountains sticking out of the water. We rode around in a boat for three days and two nights. It was a little bit foggy when we were there, but that made it even cooler. The local legend is that a huge snake escaped into the bay and that the mountains are the parts of the snake sticking up from the water. Here is a picture of me at Halong Bay and here is a close-up of some of the mountains. We stopped one day and hiked up to the top of a mountain to look out over the bay. On the way up, we saw a water buffalo. We ended up seeing water buffalos all over Vietnam and they were one of my favorite animals there.

From Halong Bay we travelled south to Da Nang, which is in the middle of the country. It is right near the DMZ, which was the Demilitarized Zone during the war. We went on a tour and saw an old American army lookout and as we were walking we found an old wrapper from a soldier's rations. We also saw some rubber trees. The trees were cut at an angle and white rubber juice seeped out into a cup. It was pretty neat.

From there we went down to Nha Trang which was on the coast. It was a nice place, and is where we celebrated Christmas. Uncle Jim had oysters one night and he said they were the best (and cheapest) he's ever had. I think they were disgusting. I saw something that looked exactly the same coming out of a water buffalo's nose!

From Nha Trang, we went to Mui Ne, which was another coastal town. We spent New Year's Eve there and it was pretty nice. We rode around on scooters and saw the harbor with tons of boats floating. We also went and saw some really big sand dunes. It was a strange beach though, one day we saw cows sunbathing!

After Mui Ne we went to Saigon, which is the biggest city in the south. It was fun for a big city. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken one day, which we hadn't had in a long time. Apparently it's a new thing there.

Overall, we had a good time seeing Vietnam. It is a big country (very long, really) and it took us a long time, but we saw a lot of places and met a lot of people. It was pretty fun.

Laos

On December 5th, we crossed the Mekong river from Chiang Rai, Thailand to Huay Xai, Laos. Here I am entering Laos. From there, we took a slow boat down the river to Pakbeng and then to Luang Prabang. The ride took two days, which is a long time to sit, but the scenery was nice. Here I am with some boats and
here is a sunset over the Mekong river. We got to Luang Prabang, which is a city where the Mekong and the Khan river meet. We saw a banana tree, and I was surprised to see that bananas grow upward. We also went to a really cool waterfall. From Luang Prabang, we travelled by bus to Phonsavan. There is a place near Phonsavan filled with big stone jars that ancient people used to store the ashes of their ancestors. It was really nice, but you couldn't wander around since there are still landmines all over the place from the war. Luckily, the trail is marked with MAG markers which means someone has come in and made sure to remove all the mines from the trail. There were also a lot of bomb craters in the area too. I asked Uncle Jim about it, but he told me he would tell me about it later. I think that means I have to find out for myself. Anyway, from Phonsavan, we headed down a really bumpy road to Vietnam. They almost didn't let Uncle Jim in since he has a beard in his passport picture and his passport was issued in Ecuador. We made it in eventually though. Here I am at the border between Laos and Vietnam.

India

After Venice, we rode on a train back to Frankfurt, Germany.
We got off the train at the airport and got straight onto a plane
for India. We landed in the Mumbai, which use to be called Bombay,
and then flew again to Delhi. India is very different from Europe.
We were amazed at how busy it was. There are tons of cars and motorized
rickshaws and bike rickshaws and animals everywhere. The major religion
in India is Hinduism and in Hinduism, cows are sacred, which means that
nobody eats beef and cows are allowed to roam wherever they want.

Here is a cow on the road.

In India, people carry things on their head.

From Delhi, we went to Pushkar where there is a holy lake and a huge camel fare. Here I am at the camel fare. They decorate the camels to make them look nicer so that people will buy them. Here I am with a camel, and here are some more camels, and here is the whole camel fare.
Check out these camel teeth.

People also decorate their elephants.

When we were driving to the camel fare, we saw this family of monkies on the side of the road. Here they are again.

From Pushkar, we went to see the Taj Mahal. It is a huge white building with lots of precious stones inlaid in the marble. Here I am at the Taj Mahal.

We saw a lot of neat things in India, but it is a very big country. It would take a really long time to really get to know it, but I'm glad we got to see a little bit.

-- Rover the Bear

Venice

Venice is the coolest place we've been to yet, except maybe Prague. The entire town was built on the sea, and there are canals going in all directions around the city. You have to read the map carefully, because with one wrong turn, you can end up walking down a narrow street that ends at a canal, with no way to get across.

Here is a canal.
Since the town is built on the sea, the canals sometimes flood. The most famous place in Venice, St. Marks Square, flooded one day that we were there. People had to walk on planks set up on metal bars. Some people put on rubber boots and just walked right through the water.

We went on a walk, and went to see some sculptures at an old church. When we got there, we learned that they were having an exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci's inventions. da Vinci had lots of notebooks full of ideas, and the church had a bunch of models of Da Vinci's ideas. Da Vinci lived a long time ago, from 1452-1519) and he invented a scuba diving system, an airplane, a bicycle and lots of neat machines. My favorite was a big turtle shaped tank. Here I am in front of a model of the tank.

He also made improvements to the catapault and had a great idea for defending castles. He had one model where a big bar would get pushed out from the castle walls to make the invaders' ladders fall over. It was really neat.

Venice is very old and there are buildings from the 12th century here. It is neat to see all the old buildings still being used today.

The food here is really good too.

Croatia and Slovenia

I spent a week in Croatia and Slovenia with Uncle Jim, Aunt Dara and Uncle Jim's parents. It was very interesting. Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until World War I and then I think it was part of Yugoslavia after World War II and then there was another war in the 1990s and now there are more countries. It's all very confusing, but the borders seem to keep changing.

Our first stop was in the capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. They had
a big castle over the city, and one of the bridgeshad really cool dragon statues on a bridge.

Then we drove over to a nice town named Karaska Gora in Slovenia.

They havecars named after me here.

Karaska Gora was right at the beginning of a road that you can take over the mountains, but we couldn't use the road since they were filming the movie Heidi there. So we had to go a different way.

Next, we drove through Croatia, which is on the Adriatic Sea, just east of Italy, and we could see a lot of buildings that were bombed out and that had no roofs. It looks like it was a bad war.

In the far south of Croatia is a very old walled city on the sea named Dubrovnik. It was really cool, with castle towers in the corners. It would have been very hard for anyone to attack the town since the walls were so big and thick.

Here is a picture of one of the towers.

You can walk around the entire town on the castle walls. Here you can see the sea and another tower.

All the roofs are made of clay.

When we were there, we saw the BBC filming a movie about Cassanova.

I don't know if I can say that Dubrovnik is my favorite castle since the whole town is a castle, but it was definitely the best fortress we have seen.

Prague

We have been in Prague for a few days now. This is a very mysterious place, full of castles and churches and winding roads. It is very cool. In the center of the town, there is a huge astronomical clock. It is very hard to understand what it means, but there are symbols for all the planets and a big dial of names. Each day is a different name. It is very cool. Also, the towers are really neat. There is a big bridge, the Saint Charles Bridge, with a cool tower with good views of the city. Tonight, we are going on the Prague Ghost Tour. I don't know what to expect.

Yesterday we saw a statue of Golem... you can look him up.

Germany

After The Netherlands, we came to Germany. We took a train from Brussels, which is the capital of the European Union, to Frankfurt. There, we got a car and started driving. It was really hard to get out of the city. Aunt Dara said it was because the street names are so long, but Uncle Jim said it was because Aunt Dara didn't know how to read a map. We finally got on the Autobahn. The Autobahn has no speed limit, and you can feel it when a fast car passes you. I didn't feel safe.
That night we went to Wurzburg. The next day we drove down The Romantic Road. We went thru Tauberbischofsheim thru to Rothenburg. Rothenburg is a medieval walled city. The next day we drove to Hiedelberg, which has a big red castle, with cool engravings. Here I am at the castle in front of a door.

Then we went down to the Bavarian Alps which are very nice.
We stayed in a nice town named Obersdorf and the next day we took a cable car up to the top of a mountainand spent the next 6 hours walking back to the town.
It was really nice though. Here is another picture.

After Oberstdorf, we went to the
Castle Neuschwanstein. It is the castle that inspired the castle in Disneyland.

Now we are in Munich, which has some really cool buildings.

Germany is very nice.