Bali

The sunsets are amazing on Kuta and a lot of people come out for them because the temperature actually drops moderately to a comfortable level. The locals always play soccer, the volleyballs come out, and the surfing is great right up until you loose visibility. I haven't seen Kelly Slater or Andy Irons out there yet but I'll let you know when I do...

Bali is a really great place that I would say is best described as Mexico for the Australians (only not quite as shady as modern day mexico) and it's waaaay cheaper. Great beaches, shopping, nightlife (as if every night is Friday night), and eventually we'll get some white water rafting and volcano hiking in as well. We just haven't made it past Kuta beach yet since we arrived 3 days ago. We also have plans to visit the neighboring island of Lombok for about 10 days while we are down here. Now that we have an uninfected camera card we will be able to post more pics again.

The F1 race turned out to be a little bit disappointing due to the heavy rain cutting the race down from 56 laps to 33 laps. We were glad that we saw the cars so much during the couple of days before the race both in practice and qualifying. Jensen Button grabbed the pole and ended up winning the race (that's 2 in a row for him). Pit strategy played in a lot less with the shorter race so it's not much of a surprise that he won. Definitely glad to have witnessed these cars running though, very incredible machines to see in person! I hope all of the practice session photos aren't corrupt...

Sihanoukville & Sen Monorom - F1!

After our fun ride to Kampot & Kep down on the coast, we did some easy riding up the coast to the slightly larger beach town of Sihanoukville for a couple of days. This was a great vacation from our vacation where we pretty much chilled out on the white sand beach for three days and ate bar-b-qued fish (literally, whole ones) and frequented the beach bars.

The trip back to Phnom Penn by dirtbike was really uneventful, mostly paved surprisingly, with much less dust inhalation. We did the trip early in the morning to avoid hot weather and get the bike back the rental place by noon. We had a quick night's turnaround and then we traveled northeast to Sen Monorom by "mini-bus." Nothing short of a 9 hour journey in a 90's toyota minivan with 15 people (meant to hold 11) and cases and bags of food, oh yeah, and the road was at best 50% paved. Much of it was "just being built," we have better logging roads in the states.

Sen Monorom was a great quiet (relative to tourists we'd been around) place in the countryside of Cambodia. We rented a scooter and did some extreme off-road scooting through the villages and hills of that area to some waterfalls. We also found one of our favorite viewpoints on a hill where you could see for many many miles (partially into Vietnam) and it was all just green lush emerald jungle that we caught at sunset. I would post some pictures but it appears that our memory card has caught a virus from these internet cafes and this particular one will not remove the virus without deleting all of our pics. We are optimistic that we haven't lost a couple of weeks worth of pictures but we are switching cards just to be sure we don't continue with this issue. The joys of traveling...

Anyway, our journey back to Phnom Penn was far more memorable than our trip out (if you can believe that). There were no "mini-vans" going back to town so we were put on a "truck." This was lifted early 90's extended cab Toyota that they fit 4 people in the front seat, 5 people in the rear seat (including us), filled the bed with huge ginger root & curry sacks, throw everyones bags on top of that, and then pile about 12 people on to hold everything in. This was truely "interesting" to us and it only lasted for 9 hours.

We are now soaking up the more modern city of Kuala Lumpur where we were excited to eat Pizza Hut this evening =) after the F1 qualifying today. It looks like we may get some rain during the race as we've had thunderstorms the last two days at the time that the race will be tomorrow. Also, the cars are very tightly matched and because of the new rules, it seams that the field has been quite mixed from the last couple of seasons (McLaren, Renault, & Ferrari not looking so good). Should be a great race!