After leaving Sydney at 10pm and 14 hours of flying, we arrived in Dubai at 5am. As we rode in the taxi to our hotel we could see that downtown was shrouded in what looked like fog. Our very friendly taxi driver assured us it would only last an hour (since he was friendly, I asked him about Gas prices. In Dubai its ~$1US / L but he said in Saudi it's closer to $0.50 US /L). We checked in and Bill went straight to bed since he did not sleep much on the plane. I we...

For our last few days in Australia we rented a car and drove to Katoomba to do some hiking in the Blue Mountains National Park. Less than two hours from the beaches of Sydney we were deep into dense forest and mountains (max elevation of 3000 ft) abounding with waterfalls. We stopped on the way to our apartment and did a quick hike to Wentworth Falls. It was nice but given it was Saturday, it was crowded with tourists so we cut our hiking short and headed off to ...

For our final two weeks in Australia we returned to Sydney. I had been wanting to stay at a Meriton Serviced Apartments since we started planning for this trip. They looked great online and got great reviews, but were pretty expensive. At last we were checking in to one in the suburb of Zetland (about 30 minutes by bus from downtown and pretty much everywhere else we wanted to go). It far surpassed our expectations. It was spacious, clean, modern, and best of al...

We arrived back in Cairns at 6:00am and were kicked off the boat by 7:30am. We picked up our rental car and headed to our hotel where we hung out poolside until our room was ready. It was great to be back in a roomy apartment in Cairns with a much better bed than we had in our cabin. We discovered a huge bat (flying fox) colony right in the middle of town. After all our efforts to get bat pictures in Brisbane, here were thousands of them. We took our cameras and...

We spent the weekend in Cairns before we took off on our dive trip. Cairns is a beach town similar to something you'd find in the Caribbean. We stayed at the Hilton Doubletree. Our room didn't have a kitchen but we bought cereal and yogurt so we could have breakfast in the room. We ate our cereal out of the water glasses since we didn't have bowls. Afterwards, I rinsed them and stacked them with the dirty coffee mugs. The next morning, I discovered that the maid ...