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Graduation Complete

In another step towards our travels around SEA I graduated this week from Deakin University in Geelong with a Master of Leadership degree. It took me 18 months to complete the course, which I completed online. It was a tough course to complete, with a few different elements; online units requiring typically three assessments to be submitted, online short courses to be passed, completion of submissions to prove my leadership experience, and finally a capstone project (which also comprised three assessments).

I was also asked to give a speech in response of the graduates present for the graduation ceremony. A little bit of a daunting task, I’ve presented to some large groups before, but not as many as a thousand.

A couple of champagnes at the end of the ceremony and that was that!!

Set a short ride outside of Hua Hin is Rajabhakti Park, which has seven magnificent statues of soldiers through various eras. Each statue is 14 metres high, and the detail is incredible on each one of them. We sneaked around the back of the statues also, and the detail is continued on all sides. (So...

What a welcome to Beijing!!! NOT!!! The announcement on the aircraft, to my ears, was along the lines of if you don’t record fingerprints when you arrive at Daxing International Airport (Beijing) you are likely to be deported; that didn’t feel like the welcome I was expecting!! Anyway, we are pretty much compliant with authorities...

Dinner on our first night in Geelong, and this isn’t a bad Thai. In fact, it’s one of the better ones. What makes it better? Fresh herbs and spices; fresh curry leaves and peppercorns are easy to miss. I was asked how spicy I would like it, ‘Thai spicy’, yes absolutely, and it was certainly...

This was our chosen location for our final day in Hua Hin and our last trip out on the bike. Only 30 mins from our hotel so an easy ride after breakfast. I’d only seen the temple advertised on a taxi advertising board so we had no idea how large the site would actually be....

Is there nothing more quintessential than eating Peking Duck in Beijing, or more precisely (but outdated) eating Peking Duck in Peking? (If you’re wondering, Peking was the capital of China until the capital was renamed in 1954, with mainstream Western media fully adopting the new name in the 1990’s.) This dish is synonymous with the...

A fairly quiet day today, we had a flight at 19:00 to Shanghai so we took it fairly easy. We decided to go to the Muslim Quarter, somewhere we had heard about, but didn’t really know much about. This was a great area, a labyrinth of streets filled with small food stalls, souvenir places and...