Monk passing an ornate door

Later Joanne and I took a walk into the real Tibetan end of town to look for the start of the outer kora, a Buddhist pilgrim path around the monastery. We couldn't find the start of the walk, which takes you along the ridge high above the town. We weren't too bothered though, as the walk around the Tibetan end of town had been lovely, and Joanne didn't really feel up to the hike anyway. We took a break, during which we spent a bit more time online planning the New Zealand leg of our trip.

Ornate door

Tibetan family

Monks getting out of class

In the afternoon we decided just to walk around the inner kora which is three kilometres long and passes 1174 prayer wheels. Many of the inhabitants make this journey at least once a day, spinning each prayer wheel as they pass. The wheels are each painted with the same ornate design and it's fascinating to watch so many Buddhists, ranging from monks to very Westernised-looking people, all going through this same ritual. We followed the path all the way around the monastery and monks' quarters to just above the town, from where we could look down on some of those buildings, while above us on the hillside were little meditation huts.

Small part of the kora

Prayer wheels along the kora

Monk spinning a big corner prayer wheel

View down the prayer wheels

View other way down the prayer wheels

Fortress-like Tibetan architecture

Mani stone carved in the hillside

The top part of the kora, passed the mediation huts

The monks querters around the monastery

Last part of the kora

Just coming to the end of our circuit, we bumped into Reitse, who told us that he had heard that, although the town was open to Westerners, it was only supposed to be people in tour groups who were allowed. This explained all the hassle we had getting there.

Doing the kora

Reitse from Freisland

written by  The Happy Couple on August 8, 2009 from Xiàhé, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Our guide

Our guide was a monk, who took us round the monastery's buildings explaining about the monks' lives and their religious practice. He had been living in the monastery since he was eight and seemed quite happy with his lot. Tibetan Buddhism seems very heavily influenced by Hinduism and features one thousand Buddhas who are worshipped as gods, not to mention a multitude of protector spirits, of which there were many paintings around the monastery, painted in an incredibly Hindu style and very much resembling the Hindu goddesses Kali or Durga. This is not at all the way I had understood Buddhism to work; I didn't think there were gods as such and I'm sure that the Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, did not intend for people following his teachings to worship him or any other Buddhas.

The monastery

Most of the buildings featured an image of Maitreya the future Buddha who he informed us is extremely important. He told us that they were members of the Yellow Hat Sect and this is one of six temples dedicated to their sect. He explained that they focused their studies mostly on philosophy and music, whereas other sects such as the Red Sect tended to focus more on medicine. Every building we entered, our guide started with “This building was not destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so everything is original” then for a couple of buildings he said “This was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution”. He clearly had no love for the Chinese and made occasional snide but fairly light-hearted remarks about the Chinese tourists who visit the monastery. Throughout our tour we were only just ahead of a noisy Chinese group.

The car park in front of the monastery

There used to be over four thousand monks in the monastery, he told us, but the numbers were greatly reduced during the Cultural Revolution and currently the numbers are restricted by the Chinese government to twelve hundred. He explained that their line of living Buddhas was third in importance after the Panchen and Dalai lamas who, explained, choose each other's successor when one of them dies. While he was talking about that I remembered the posters we had seen in Macleodganj protesting about the Chinese government's kidnapping of the Panchen Lama when he was six years old. He has been missing for over a decade now, so I asked what would happen if the Dalai Lama died without the Panchen Lama being found and he said “Yes. It's a big problem in Buddhism”. He said he couldn't say very much because it's difficult to talk about these things since the recent trouble. The day before Reitse's guide had told him that during one wave of protests, twenty thousand soldiers arrived and announced that they would be staying in the monastery, where they stayed until they had searched the quarters of every monk and taken dozens away for questioning. Many of them had still not been released.

Unfortunately the weather wasn't very nice that day, so we didn't spend much time outside taking photographs and we were not permitted to take any inside.

We spent all afternoon working on our New Zealand itinerary, not wanting to run into the kind of transport difficulties we did in China. That evening we returned to the same Tibetan restaurant we had eaten on the first night and had a delicious meal. Afterwards we finalised our New Zealand plan and even went as far as booking all the transport: we had discovered a cheap bus company called Naked Bus, which worked out much cheaper than hiring a camper van, paying for petrol, and parking it in places with facilities, which had been our original plan. The final missing piece in our plan was the return flight from the south to the north Island in time for our flight to Santiago. Excited by the fact we were now thinking about Santiago we even started to work on our South America plan, resulting in an eye-stinging six hours online.

Yak hot pot

Joanne's nice Tibetan food

Tibetan bread

Muslim tea

written by  The Happy Couple on August 9, 2009 from Xiàhé, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Disheartened I sat back down next to Joanne and we settled in for a wait. Presently some Chinese people appeared near us and started to become quite agitated, raising their voices and looking very angry. Soon one of them sat down next to us and it turned out she was an English teacher. She asked if we were also waiting for the 8:30 bus and I asked what they were upset about. Apparently they had bought tickets for the 7:30 bus the previous day but when they turned up at 7:15 the bus had already gone. I told her that it must have been gone ten minutes before that because it wasn't there when we arrived. She was from Suzhou and had enjoyed her stay except for the terrible service from the bus, she said. I thought it was pretty much par for the course in Asia, but I didn't say that.

The direct bus was much faster and we had no problems taking the two local buses required to get us to the airport, where our hotel was. Our flight from Lanzhou to Guangzhou the next day was pretty early and just the start of a very long and complicated day which would get us onto the plane to New Zealand, so we didn't want the extra hassle of getting to the airport so early, probably before the airport bus was running and we had been quite pleased when the hostel in Xi'an had been able to book the airport hotel for us.

Everything had gone remarkably smoothly since we left Xiàhé but, when we arrived at the airport we realised we hadn't asked for the name of the hotel to be written down in Chinese and we weren't even sure what its name was in pinyin. We knew there we three airport hotels so we were going to have to go into each in turn and find out if it was the place. Not as easy as it sounds: none of the buildings opposite the airport had anything other than Chinese signs so we weren't even certain where the three hotels were. One was obvious so we decided to start there but, once inside, it all started to become a bit farcical: we tried saying what we thought the name of the hotel was but, without it written down, we couldn't be sure she was understanding even if we did have the name right. It was a total failure and we were about to leave and look for the other hotels when the girl had an idea and reached for a piece of paper under the desk. She showed it to us an pointed at it then us. It said “Joanne McAllister” on it. A miracle! What a lucky and easy day this was after all.

The hotel was awful. So much for luck! Being a hotel rather than a hostel it was quite a bit more expensive than we usually paid, reasoning it was worth it to avoid all the hassle in the morning, but it was absolutely minging and our room had clearly not been cleaned: there was still toilet paper in the bin and the towel had obviously been used. I took a shower and the drain was blocked so that the bathroom filled with so much water it was threatening to overflow past the lip designed to keep the bedroom dry. In another victory for my Mandarin skills I managed to say to the girl on the desk that the room was not clean then, just to be sure, I showed her a line from the phrase book translating as “Please will you clean my room” and we went out for food. When we came back the room had been cleaned a bit, but the floor had obviously not been vacuumed in a very long time. Oh well it was only for one night.

Funny pear crossed with aubergine fruit

It was probably worth it because in the morning we just got up and walked across the road to the airport with our bags. We had plenty of time to wait around and I bought myself one of the strangest fruits I've tasted. It looked a bit like an aubergine crossed with a pear, which I thought was quite pretty, but it also tasted a bit like an aubergine crossed with a pear, which was not very pleasant, but very very unusual.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 10, 2009 from Lanzhou, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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We took off from Xi'an early and landed thirty minutes ahead of schedule. This was great because we had a succession of transport links which would get us to Hong Kong airport, with not much time to spare, although we had allowed a fair amount of leeway at every step. The plan was Lanzhou to Guangzhou by plane; airport shuttle bus from Guangzhou airport to Guangzhou East Train Station; train from Guangzhou to Kowloon in Hong Kong; then the airport express from Kowloon Station. The crucial step was the train journey from Guangzhou to Kowloon and our original schedule had us waiting for quite a while for a train there, which would get us to Hong Kong only just in time to check in, so I wasn't very happy about it at all. I hoped that we would get there early enough to get the previous train, but an alternative and possibly more complicated plan if we didn't get the previous train to Kowloon was to get a train instead to Shenzhen, just inside China then walk over the border to Hong Kong, where we could get on the Hong Kong Metro and take that to the airport.

When it all seemed to be going so smoothly the luggage belt stopped just as we got there. Then when they finally restarted it my bag was one of the last off and we could see all of our advantage evaporating. Waiting for the shuttle bus, I noticed some black stuff over the back of my big rucksack. Could it be that the Chilli Bovril I had been taking round the world since South Africa had smashed in my bag and leaked through? It seemed quite likely. This was the first time I had packed it without the protection of the plastic cups I had been shoving the jar in. I did not relish the thought of trying to clean up the black sticky mess of smashed glass from all over my clothes while rushing to make it in time for the international flight.

The shuttle bus took us across Guangzhou too late for the train I wanted to catch, which meant we would have to wait for one hour forty minutes for the next one, leaving us with no margin at all. I suggested to Joanne that we should consider that Shenzhen train instead but she was not keen on the complication of not knowing what the border crossing entailed or where the metro station in the other side was. So we waited. At least the wait meant I had time to investigate my bag, discovering to my huge relief that the black sticky mess did not originate inside my bag. Some other person on the Guangzhou plane was now dealing with a mess in their bag some of which had leaked onto mine. Unlucky for them!

The train left more-or-less on time, but soon after it left the station it stopped for ten minutes. We were getting quite worried. It never seemed to get up to full speed and it stopped several more times. This was supposed to be an express! Eventually it arrived, forty minutes late, meaning that we would maybe make before the check-in closed but only if we got the airport express immediately. After going through customs at the station we ran up the stairs to find our where the airport express leaves from. It leaves from Kowloon Station we were told. But surely that's where we are: we had bought tickets to Kowloon and arrived at Hung Hom which we had seen online is Kowloon Station. It turned out we must have misread something or seen a mistake on a website: Hung Hom is in Kowloon, but Kowloon Station is actually a different one. We were stuffed! There was nothing to do but run outside and flag down a taxi. The taxi driver was not getting into bartering: it's a good price, he said, because he was going to pick someone up at the airport anyway. Hong Kong is definitely still not China. No bartering and very high prices, but Joanne reminded me how much the airport express would have been and the taxi was actually only slightly more at HK$250, so we agreed and were saved.

The flight was absolutely terrible: because we had arrived so late all of the good seats were gone and we had to take the two seats in the middle, behind the section of the plane where the put all of the children. The row in front was a couple with two young children; one of them screamed for nearly the entire twelve hour journey and the other one bounced up an down on armrests of the chair in front of me while the parents did nothing at all. After all the awful transport we had taken in Asia I remembered that aeroplanes are the most uncomfortable form of transport known to man: the moulded seats are far less comfortable than any wooden bench because they are moulded for short people and the headrest makes you crane your head forward no matter how far you recline your chair. Because of these things I find it very hard to sleep on planes so I hate night flights but, with the children on this flight it was just impossible. I don't know why children are allowed on planes. It's just selfish to take them. Nobody in our row got any sleep at all then when the aeroplane's blinds went up and it was time to wake up, the whole demon family were soundly sleeping in a row. I was tempted to start screaming and kicking the chairs, but I managed to restrain myself.

Wow!

So that was it: China over. I really enjoyed China and I'd quite like to return some time, maybe to learn the language, which fascinates me. We felt quite hesitant about returning to China after having spent time with Tibetans in Nepal and India and the cultural suppression of Tibet is appalling, however if we were to boycott all countries with unethical policies there wouldn't be very many places in the world to go, and I'd certainly not be able to return home to Britain. There is actually another side to the Tibetan issue: educational opportunities and quality of life in Tibet have improved massively, particularly the poor's, since the annexation but the suppression of culture that accompanies this is inexcusable. I would like to see Tibet proper on my return and I'd also like to see some of the more remote areas, and cross over into Mongolia to see what that is like.

Remainders of EXTREME chili Sichuan chicken dish

I was very impressed with how modern Chinese cities are and how widespread environmental measures like electric vehicles and energy-saving bulbs are; you never see an incandescent bulb in China. The low-light must be the food though. Although we had a few excellent meals and the by far the hottest food in Asia, most of the time the meat was just awful. I suppose this was partly due to not knowing what we were doing most of the time we ordered, but I think it would be hard to order nice food all the time.

Precocious Chinese children

The people are generally very nice and friendly, although in big cities this nice temperament is abused by very convincing nice friendly con-artists all over the place. The human rights record in China may not be up to much, but there is no sign of the people being unhappy. Russel, the English teacher we met in Vietnam, had been working in China and raised the human rights issue with some Chinese friends. They insisted that his concern was to completely misunderstand Eastern, particularly Chinese, psychology. They told him that Chinese people do not really have a sense of self like Westerners and to them their awareness begins at a collective level; where a Westerner sees an individual's human rights being abused, they told him, a Chinese person will just see a disruptive element being removed from society. It's hard to believe that an individual's psychology could be so collective as to virtually lose empathy for other individuals in preference for the group, but what do I know – I'm just a individualistic Westerner. Whatever the truth on an individual level, it does seem like this philosophy has been put into practice by the Chinese government: the quality of life in China has improved far faster than any other country in recent times. OK, so some individuals have suffered terribly in the process, but is it worth it if the end result is a massive uplift of society in general? My Western morals reflexively say not, but I don't think it's really as morally a straightforward choice as my gut tells me.

Kyanjin Gompa

As we flew away from China I realised that we were not just leaving China, but leaving Asia after seven months. To some extent it was a relief, because Asia can be really tough at times, but my overwhelming feeling was one of sadness. I really love Asia. There's a lawlessness that I find really exciting, augmented by the fact most of it is so busy. It's just crazy, the madness of Asia climaxing in India which somehow hangs together despite all of the chaos. But despite this lawlessness, it very rarely feels like you are in any danger from people out to do you harm. I think you are farm more likely to be involved in an accident than the West, but I am sure that you are far less likely to be a victim of crime. Of course there are exceptions, where there are high concentrations of tourists, like the Khaosan Road to Thai islands buses, but generally Asia feels extremely safe as far as danger from other people goes, but you are not protected in the same way as we are in the West. Surely this is the right way round: I would rather be responsible for my own wellbeing than having the state prevent me from doing things it considers dangerous or criminals out to damage my wellbeing? And what lovely people for the most part: from the kind and gentle Tibetan Nepalis to the ultra-cute children in Cambodia, there were many things I admired in every culture we encountered. Of course as a Westerner the difference in culture can be very frustrating: having to haggle over everything can be great fun, but it gets annoying at times, particularly in India, where the rules of fairness seem to be more flexible than in the West. Other than that most of the food is great and all of your senses are constantly assailed: apart from the delicious and sometime unusual food, it's noisy and smelly. But I think we Westerners are generally a bit too fussy about things like hygiene. Lastly, the weather is generally hot which I love, and for the most part it's very cheap so you spend a lot of time there without spending much money. So how much of shock was it going to be going in the other direction: we were heading to New Zealand where there was going to be health and safety (not sure about crime), it would be cold, and it would be expensive. Why were we going there again? At least there would be good beer and wine, something very much absent from Asia. And we would be understood wherever we went! No more struggling with tonal languages or difficult scripts. I was viewing New Zealand as a rest. A little stop off before the excitement continues in South America.

Take photo!

written by  The Happy Couple on August 11, 2009 from Hong Kong, Hong Kong
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Customs was chaotic: coming from Hong Kong, the plane was full of Asians who had transferred from various different countries but all ones, it seemed, where you cannot leave the house without packing enough homemade food to last a week. Indians and Chinese people in particular were having to give up about half of their luggage, handing over Tupperware boxes of sauces and flat breads wrapped in tinfoil. One family was repeatedly sent back from the X-ray by increasingly irritated officials. Our berries were fine, apparently, although I had expected to have to give them up. The combination of dried and vacuum-packed seemed apparently made them safe, but the same was not true for my amusing chicken feet, which I had to watch being thrown into a hazardous waste bin. Even the trusty chilli Bovril was allowed, although I'm sure there must be some mistake there.

Through customs, I thought Auckland looked like Scotland crossed with South Africa. The big colonial-style bungalows and two-storey buildings with wrought iron balconies contributed the South African part, but I'm not sure what made it seem Scottish; maybe it was the fact it was cold, cloudy, and wet. It was different from Scotland in that there were lots of churches – and they haven't been converted into bars and restaurants! What possible other use could they have for them?

It was cold and wet in Auckland (there's the Sky Tower)

At the hostel, we were delighted to find that Berghaus had done as they said they would and sent by courier a replacement rucksack for one that broke at the start of Japan. They had been slow to respond initially and changing countries twice had confused things, but once they got going their customer service was excellent and now Joanne had a lovely new model to replace the useless one still held together by dental floss (top tip, by the way). When we got online we discovered that Joanne's friend, Sharon, had sent an email to say she had received the guide books Joanne had arranged to send to her house, so it was all going smoothly.

We were very tired from our terrible flight, but we were keen to drink some red wine and went out to get some. Drinking the wine, we got talking to a middle-aged guy who commented or complained, I couldn't tell, that Auckland is like being in a different country, there are so many Asians here. He was from the south island in New Zealand and thought it was only a matter of time before the north island becomes completely Asian. I had been thinking how strange it was to see so many white people and hadn't really noticed how many Asians there were, because I was used to seeing Asians so it didn't seem unusual. He claimed that earlier in the day four out of five people he passed were Asian. I'm sure he was exaggerating here and the demographics don't support anything like that proportion but it is true that there are quite a lot of Asian immigrants, most of them students and their families. Maybe this was good as it would break us out of Asia and into Western culture gently!

After the wine we decided to go out an explore the nightlife a bit. After a very expensive mojito in a bar that was clearly too upmarket for us, we found a cheaper one where the Irish barman, hearing that it was our first night in New Zealand, insisted on treating us to a lock-in. It was not a good move for us: we stayed out too late and drank several Green Chartreuses each, which is never a good idea as everyone only ever drinks it because it's the strongest thing in the bar (they had no absinthe, thank goodness).

written by  The Happy Couple on August 12, 2009 from Auckland, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Slightly puzzled but quite sure that none of the chaos could possibly have been us, we went into the kitchen to make some much-needed coffee. One of the other guests asked me if we found our keys last night. Not having any idea what he was talking about I said yes, since we must have had them to get into the room. A few minutes later the middle-aged guy we'd been speaking to early the previous evening came in and asked us if we had found our keys and not long afterwards one of the guys running the hostel asked the same question. At this point I had to admit that I had no idea what they were talking about and confess that I didn't clearly remember getting back to the hostel. He informed me that main reason for his interest was that he had lent us a spare set of keys, which he was keen to see returned, when we had been unable to locate ours in Joanne's bag. Someone had let us in at the main door, but we were stymied when it came to our own room. Very embarrassed, I rushed back to the room and found a set of keys sitting on the table next to the bed. Meanwhile Joanne found ours in her purse.

Having wasted most of the day by waking up so late, we wandered into the town centre to get a feel for the place. Considering it is the biggest town in New Zealand, Auckland is tiny but then with only 4.3 million inhabitants in the whole country, there are not many New Zealanders to go around. I kept being reminded of Glasgow but again I'm not sure why. Probably still just the cold and the rain. On the way back from town, inevitably, we passed the Irish barman who had so kindly locked us in and served us green chartreuse the previous night. I didn't feel like speaking to him; I must not drink green chartreuse again.

We behaved ourselves that night and the next day returned to town to meet Joanne's friends Sharon and Derek. They had kindly agreed to receive post for us, so they brought us our South America on a Budget and New Zealand Rough Guides; completely sick of the Lonely Planet after it was all that was available in Asia. They also brought us a DVD full of MP3s that Joanne's brother-in-law, Robert, had sent us to allow us to change some of the music on our MP3 players we had become completely bored of.

The Sky Tower - still obscured by rain

We left them and went to Auckland museum. It was really pissing down and we had to wring our clothes out in the toilets when we got there. I wasn't all that impressed with the museum, partly because the exhibits weren't in any kind of chronological order, which I found very confusing; they preferred to have a room of “Maori stuff” and another room of “Birds” and another room about “Scottish immigrants” which is all very well, but I would rather have seen how each area of interest impinged on the others and at what point in time they all intersected. It wasn't a well put together display at all.

There wasn't as much as I'd hoped about New Zealand before the Maoris arrived either. The Rough Guide had really piqued my interest when I read that Maoris probably did not arrive until the 13th Century. I had assumed that they had been there ages before the Europeans arrived but in fact they only just beat them by about four hundred years. Not that long ago a friend of mine – Gavin I think it was – had seen a promotional video by the New Zealand tourism board which had described New Zealand as “The newest country in the world” and we had both assumed that this was a piece of Euro-centric propaganda, since it was about the last place white men found, but in fact they knew what they were talking about and it was perfectly accurate. That somewhere on Earth was not inhabited by humans until so late in human history I find amazing.

What I did learn at the museum, though, I found very interesting: New Zealand split from Gondwanaland so early that it went down an entirely different evolutionary path from the rest of the world; even Australia with its weird marsupials and so on is a much more modern deviation than New Zealand. All the trees native to New Zealand are also endemic, which is further confirmation of the early isolation. Frogs native to New Zealand do not go through a tadpole phase, now generally considered de rigeur by other frogs; instead they are laid in yolky eggs, rather like reptiles, and born as froglets complete with little tails and legs. Oh yes, Creationists, you are so right: clearly Evolution is just a myth!

There were no ground-dwelling mammals on New Zealand until the Maoris arrived, bringing, apart from themselves, some kind of Polynesian rat as food, and dogs. The only mammals before were some bats, which presumably flew all the way from Australia or other Pacific islands. The explanation for the lack of mammals is that mammals had not yet evolved by the Gondwanaland separation. In turn, since New Zealand's dinosaurs suffered the same catastrophe as all the rest, this meant that there were no ground-dwelling predators and over time birds evolved to fill the niche that mammals occupy elsewhere. Unfortunately for these birds, that meant that they were flightless and defenceless against humans, dogs, and rats when they arrived.

Like many guilt-ridden Westerners, I assume, I am used to thinking of European man as the baddie who causes mass-extinctions and destruction of the ecosystem when they arrive in places previously occupied only by gentle natives in-tune with their environment. Of course this view is naïve nonsense and, like the Amerindians who were guilty of massive deforestation and the extinction of the giant sloth amongst other creatures, the Maoris' arrival caused huge upheaval in the environment and many of these flightless birds in particular were extinct not long after their arrival. I had read in the Rough Guide that Maoris occupied the North Island predominantly. What the museum added was that they had originally occupied the South Island where most of the tasty flightless Moas were to be found; this is what they lived on after the most of sub-tropical plants they had brought from Polynesia failed in the temperate climate. Then once they had eaten all of the Moas, they moved back to the North Island where these who had stayed behind were beginning to learn how to cultivate the land there. Sweet potatoes, or kumara, that's what they lived on after exterminating so much of the native fauna, the only imported crop to grow successfully in the new land. Of course the dogs and rats took their toll as well and it all added up to an ecological apocalypse.

However the Maoris' ecological damage was nothing compared to what happened when the Europeans did arrive, releasing pigs early on “so there would be something to eat” when they returned, then deer a bit later “so there would be something to hunt”; and this was before colonisation had even begun. Of course they also brought the more familiar ship stowaway rat from Europe. And cats. The remaining flightless birds were doomed: they had been hiding in the forest but, after the deforestation the Maoris had begun was brought up to an industrial pace, there was nowhere to hide from the new predators and their numbers plummeted further.

The archaeological, cultural, logistical, and linguistic evidence all points to the Maoris coming from Polynesia, probably via the Cook Islands and maybe further East before returning and heading South; legend tells of the people originating from far overseas in a place called Hawaiki. They weren't explicit in the Museum, and I'm no linguist but I assumed they were suggesting that Hawaii is where their journey began, although I didn't see that implied anywhere else.

Another source of disappointment in the museum for me, was that the Maori section said absolutely nothing about the moko, the traditional Maori facial tattoos. I had hoped to find more out about them. We had seen one woman in Auckland with her chin tattooed, but that was the extent of our moko experience thus far. The museum had lots of paintings by colonial artists, where the mokos were clearly the main subject, but the panels underneath didn't even mention them: they just told you all about the artist!

When we left the museum we were soaked again. Such Scottish weather – and we didn't have the clothes for it. We had clothes for a year-long summer. Back at the hostel even more people asked us if we had found our key; clearly the owners had been very amused and told everyone about it.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 14, 2009 from Auckland, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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