Knowledge is a beard

This was the pinnacle of my beard experience;



Would you trust this man?



What I might look like at 40 (though I hope not).

France

We arrived in Paris to surprise Jean-Jospeh (Albane's brother) with breakfast. He stood staring at her, unsure what was going on, before finally realising that he wasn't dreaming. We handed him a bag of croissants in exhange for a bed for the night.



Having accompanied Amelie, Jean-Joseph's wife, to vote in the French Presidential elections, we caught the TGV to Brittany and hitched a lift with Albane's uncle to the farm. We have spent the last twenty four hours washing clothes and sorting through our kit. In the twenty four hours, we will add the finishing touches to our plan to ride our bikes through Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. The journey is not yet over........

The Hong Kong flower market

Hong Kong and Macau

The week-long Chinese holidays, which had caused us such problems in leaving Nepal, meant that the Hong Kong hotel prices were almost double what we had paid the last time. We stayed on Hong Kong island in a district that felt more authentic than the commercial, touristy madness of Kowloon. We showered and wandered up Hollywood road through shops selling 'antiques', fresh fruit and bowls of steaming noodle soup. We stopped at a temple and a young girl showed us around. Statues of the gods were worshipped and donations of food left on the altars along with bundles of smoking incense sticks.

The richer worshippers lit huge coils of incense, hanging them from the ceiling. The immense coils would take up to three months to burn out and, with tens of them above our heads, the interior of the temple was filled with an eye-stinging cloud of scented smoke. Ten minutes walk from the temple, we reached the longest covered conveyor belt in the world carrying people from the waterfront up the hillside. We struggled against the flow to the sea and took the famous Star Ferry across the Victoria Straits to wander the Flower market, the Goldfish market selling plastic bags of fish, and the Temple Street night market where the usual tourist stuff was touted at steep prices.

After ten hours on our feet, we made it back to the hotel late and showered off the grime and pollution of the city. The next day, we took the high speed ferry to Macau, the Portuguese equivalent of the British Hong Kong, and tried to find a person who could speak Portuguese. Flooded by Chinese since its handover in 1999 in accordance with the Chinese principle of diluting the British/Tibetan/Portuguese (delete as appropriate) locals, we failed to find a single person. Only the bilingual signposts and custard tarts gave us any clue as to where we were.

As the self-termed Las Vegas of the East, Macau had a string of unattractive casinos catering to the Chinese. We saw a plastic mock up of the Potala Palace in Llasa, the Great Wall and a Chinese pagoda outside a larger gambling house. We left feeling that Macau had lost its soul.

On our last morning, we shopped to ensure we met our 40 kilo baggage weight limit and checked in with Cathay Pacific, managing to get seats by the emergency exit - a great result since the extra leg room was a godsend for me on the 13 hour flight. A day later and we landed in the wet greyness of Paris airport. The 'backpacker' leg of the trip is over.

From the frying pan into the fire

Chinese holidays and apathetic Nepali agencies meant that, after three days of looking for a flight out of Kathmandu (destination = anywhere where we didn't need a visa), we jumped at the last minute flight with Biman Airlines to Hong Kong. A short stopover in somewhere called Dhaka was part of the deal, but we gave it no real thought. At Kathmandu airport, all other flights were full, so we were surprised to find that our flight was near empty. Still, we weren't complaining and arrived in Dhaka feeling pretty positive. At the airport, we joined a couple of other tourists, who had done the run before, and paid $20 each for an overnight transit hotel. We were bused through the heat and humidity of Bangladesh's biggest city (for that was where we were) and were issued a room in a buidling with barred windows and a welded steel cage around it. A sign over the door told transit passengers not to leave the building. 70 people worked in the hotel and, at any one time, ten of them were in our room attempting conversation. We eventually locked the door and ignored their knocks. The next morning, we were told that our flight was delayed by eleven hours and so we sat in our room feeling like asylum seekers. We tried to ignore the fact that no one in the world knew where we were. At eleven that night, we were driven to the airport in a huge bus and ushered past the queuing locals. Our plane to Hong Kong, not even half full, left twelve hours late. We were simply happy to be escaping.