We then wandered about the park in the cold, damp weather for the rest of the day, which was very enjoyable, really. The park serves the same purpose as New York's Central Park, but it's more consistently manicured. Central Park has big sections that are essentially natural woods with some paths through them, whereas in London's equivalent each tree was carefully planted to achieve a certain effect. There are also lots more ducks in Hyde Park, as well as their byproduct, so watch your step!

We then headed to nearby Kensington Gardens, which becomes Hyde Park further east and together are a massive stretch of greenery in the middle of the city, and almost everyone in London spends part of their weekend here in decent weather. Kensington Palace, Princess Diana's former home, lies on the far west end of the park, so we toured that first. It's a very depressing palace, built of dark brick in the 17th century, with dark paneling and small windows throughout to ensure the place is as depressing as possible. Of course only the historical, somewhat pokey rooms are open, so I assume the bulk of the palace that is still in use is more lively.

We then walked over to Kensington, and went to my old house in Campden Hill Gardens. Kensington is older than its neighbors and has a more varied housing stock, with a big section consisting of plain Georgian townhouses in a surprising variety of pastel colors, as well as the more typical blocks with Victorian flourishes. I managed to find a street where houses adopted a depressing grey brick aesthetic, but inside it was quintessentially English, tall ceilings, creaky floors, drafty and with terrible plumbing, all decorated in high chintz.

We then had lunch at Kensington Place, one of my favorite London restaurants, quite modern and buzzy with the best scallops in the world.

Holland Park proper was one of my favorite places to hang out in London when I lived there, chiefly because it was a ten minute walk from my house. It was an enormous estate owned by the Earl of Holland, who used the house as his city residence and a center for entertainment until it was reduced to rubble by air raids in World War II. The estate (and the rubble) was then gifted to the city, who turned it into a pretty park, and wisely kept the ruins of the house as is.

One thing London doesn't do well is big streets. There are loads of them cutting across the ancient villages and generally leading to the City of London, the square mile that was the heart of medieval London but now is just home for a bunch of banks. These streets are invariably lined with unimaginative shops and takeout restaurants, lots of 1960's architecture and really ugly street furniture, primarily big gates and fences ensuring pedestrians have as difficult a time as possible crossing the street. If you see London mostly from a taxi or tourist bus, you'll mostly see this ugliness, so it's very important to walk as much as possible, as the small roads are infinitely nicer and more typical of the charm of the city. That was a long lead in to the fact that we crossed ugly Notting Hill Gate to get to Holland Park. This is another residential neighborhood surrounding a park of the same name. In Holland Park you can either live in a flat in one of the grand apartments built more than a century ago as individual houses by an ambitious real estate developer, or in the cute alleyways behind these houses where the servants and horses lived.

We then walked around the posh residential areas of West London, Notting Hill, Holland Park and Kensington. While London has great historical and cultural sites that are world famous, so do many cities in Europe. But I think what makes London special are the many neighborhoods that make up the city. These villages used to be completely independent, but are now loosely bound up into modern-day London. But they still have their own governments and, more importantly, their own look and feel, and they are well worth exploring. Since Portobello Market is in Notting Hill, we started our exploring there. Somehow this neighborhood even today (2007) has the reputation of being bohemian and slightly dangerous but it was well and truly gentrified even when I lived there, so the reputation is pretty hard to justify.

After we unpacked, by which I mean opened our suitcases, looked around and decided there was no room for us to unpack, then left the suitcases on the bed to be dealt with later, we went downstairs for a surprisingly good breakfast. I say surprisingly because meals at these kinds of hotels always have an edge, which is generally not a good thing for breakfast, but Ian recognizes this and his hotels always have an easygoing breakfast, good music and a pretty traditional menu. We then headed out into the rainy London weather, targeting my old neighborhood of Kensington. First stop was the Saturday Portobello Road market, just north of Kensington in Notting Hill. As usual it was swamped with tourists, but it's a fun place to kill a couple of hours, browsing through the antiques and collectibles stands lining the street for about a mile. While most visitors are antique hunting, Somchai brushed all that aside and ventured to the far end of the market, where they sell vegetables, which he found inexplicably fascinating. Almost everywhere we travel, we end up spending an inordinate amount of time looking at vegetables thanks to Somchai.

We stayed at the St. Martin's Lane Hotel, a very hip (at the time) hotel owned by Ian Schraeger, the inventor and key booster of the hip hotel, for better or worse. I was quite into this type of hotel for a while, but, like most of the market (and Ian himself) have pretty much moved on. The lobby is fun, like in all these places, lots of odd pieces like a giant fishbowl, big gold teeth and a huge chess set, for no particular reason. Disco music everywhere, including the lifts where you're also followed by a big pair of eyes on a tv screen. It also has the Asia de Cuba restaurant usually found in Schraeger's hotels, and a trendy bar. And the staff is very easy on the eyes. As an aside, I like the format and menu of the Asia de Cuba chain, particularly the New York one, but I know a lot of people find it tired and pointlessly fusion-y, so I suspect I'm in the minority here. Anyway, of course you know where this is leading, and that is that the rooms are tiny, nicely decorated, but tiny. It was quite a challenge for two adults with excess amounts of luggage to stay here for a week, but we survived. St. Martin's Lane Hotel-(7), Room-4, Facilities-8, Service-4, Wow-3 (because I'm a sucker for the overdesigned lobby). We didn't take many photos of the lobby because we were pretending to be too cool so we'd fit in, but the photo with Somchai in it was taken in our room, and I think you can see about half the room in the photo.

58. London, England Dec '00

I had to go to London for business on short notice, and Somchai dropped everything to come along to make it a combination work/play trip. It was Somchai's first trip to England and my first time back since moving out of London seven years ago, where I had lived for three years. So I was looking forward to showing him around my old hometown. We took Qantas first class from Bangkok. Two comments, first, I will never understand why BA and Qantas, who are really identical airlines in the same alliance (and Qantas used to be partly owned by BA), have almost the same flight schedule between Sydney and London, leaving about 30 minutes apart and stopping in Bangkok. Since they also codeshare with each other, you end up with four BA and Qantas flights being called for boarding around the same time, and first time fliers on the route are inevitably confused about which flight they should be boarding. And of course it would be nice if we had more choice in departure times with a wider gap between the two. Second, a very confusing comment. Qantas clearly mimics BA in everything they do, but their version feels cleaner/newer, with BA inevitably feeling tired and behind the times. And yet there's an undercurrent of cheapness that runs through Qantas, for example their wine will always be one notch worse than BA, and their food is likewise a level below. And where this is really confusing is in cabin configuration, since when you first walk into a Qantas cabin it seems bright and new, but then it feels like everything's shrunk a bit vs. BA, like I think they've snuck a couple extra seats into first class compared to the BA layout. (In real time I just came back from a long boozy lunch, so this may not make sense when I read it later, but I'm happy with it for now). Anyway, it has flat beds which is all that matters, so I was able to sleep a bit on the flight.

I think Koh Samui is much prettier than Phuket and, notwithstanding recent development, I'm sure it's still more laidback. The main beach, Chaweng, is where all the development is focused. But it still had a nice vibe to it when we were there, especially in the evening, when the beach is converted into a strip of makeshift restaurants, serving decent Thai food and beer by candle light while you hang out on beach blankets and listen to lounge music. And the rest of the island is much less developed and more naturally scenic. With the arrival of some new and better hotels, I'd now recommend it over Phuket unless you're really into the club/bar scene.

Apart from the gnomes, the other big problem with the hotel was its bigness. The villas were priced similarly to the top Thai resorts, but one drawback here is the villas are attached to a much bigger and cheaper hotel. So the hotel food and service can't really measure up to the smaller boutique properties who they're competing with, at least in price. Tongsai Bay (5) Room: 6, Facilities: 4, Service: 2, Wow: 0.

We stayed at Tongsai Bay Resort, which was the only high-end hotel at the time. (Now there are quite a few boutique hotels here, which I think fit much better with the overall laid back feel of Samui). Tongsai is ok, but no better. There are a few villas, one of which is pictured here. They are huge, with an enormous outdoor space overlooking the bay, complete with bathtub, bed, and bar (Somchai the bartender not included). So the outside space gets two thumbs up. If you look closely at the bar area photo though, you'll see three frog statuettes. No big deal in the open deck area, but inside, the statuette theme is carried out to a horrible extreme. There were over 200 statues of frogs, garden gnomes, assorted animals etc. They were everywhere, row upon row, and were really offputting. There were also lots of plastic trees inside, which is pretty inexplicable in the tropics (or anywhere, really).

Koh Samui is the second largest island in Thailand (after Phuket) and is in the process of being Phuketicized. It didn't have any roads until the 1970's, and remained difficult to get to, but the airport put Samui firmly on the tourist map. When we were there Samui was still quite underdeveloped relative to the other Thai beach resorts, but I would think by now it's pretty indistinguishable. The airport, where these photos were taken, is great, very laid back with plenty of open space for tourists to catch some last minute sun before heading home.

57. Koh Samui, Thailand Sept '00

I know you're all diligently tracking my every entry, wondering, when will he screw up? Well, you got me. As you're no doubt aware, the New Zealand trip was in October, so why is it being followed by a Koh Samui trip in September? The long answer has to do with the miracle of time travel, but the short answer is I temporarily lost the Samui photos, but they resurfaced just as the New Zealand part of the blog was finished and I'm not smart enough to figure out if there's a way to slot Samui in chronologically, so it will remain out of order forever, and when some aliens descend on earth millions of years from now and are trying to figure out our civilization, this blog will cause them to question whether September or October comes first in our calendars, and throw all their historical research in doubt forever. Sorry about that.

I've just about run out of photos, but I'll go ahead for the sake of completeness with one last post. On Saturday, we took our last drive back to Christchurch for our final day. There wasn't much to do here, we saw the Botanical Gardens which were closed due to the hurricane on our previous visit, had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and lost some money at the casino. We decided against revisiting the George and stayed at the Park Royal, a very large hotel in the center of town that we'd almost always snub in favor of the boutique option. But in this case the big bland option won out, despite its atrium and wall to wall carpeting. On balance the George is the better hotel, but the room was just too depressing for our last day. Park Royal-(4) Room-4, Facilities-4, Service-3, Wow-0.

Oamaru is very famous for their penguins. I didn't want to disrupt the narrative flow of the last entry, but in reality after dinner we walked down to the coast for some penguin viewing, which is overrated. There a smallish species of penguin, and they're protected so you're not allowed anywhere near them. Basically about 100 people gather at dusk at the ranger's station, where a penguin fanatic named Jim takes you to a cliff far, far above the penguins. There are about 15 penguins in the colony, who dive into the ocean each morning and return here in the evening, so you spend several hours on this distant cliff waiting for the penguins to emerge from the water and waddle over to some place out of view. We only managed to see one penguin make the five second waddle in the 90 minutes we were there, but Jim was certainly excited as he boomed out "enjoy it, live it, experience it" at top volume over and over again.

The photos were taken from the observation point to give you an idea of how close you'll get to the experience, and the penguin is actually in the zoom photo if you want to exercise your "Where's Waldo?" skills. I'm sure post Happy Feet this excursion is even more popular, but I really didn't get it.

We checked into our hotel, the Pen Y Bryn Lodge, where as usual we were the only guests. It's an uber-Victorian home with all the trimmings, recently converted into a lodge. The owners, Roy and Bernice, were nice and quite fun to hang out with. There were about 5 bedrooms, a bit too chintzy but overall it's quite a pretty property. Unlike the other lodges, though, this lodge is all about the house, as they have a small plot of land and it's located in something of a suburban neighborhood. Judging by their occupancy rate, the suburbs of Oamaru may be a bit of a hard sell. We had a great dinner with our hosts, my favorite of the trip, then played some pool in their period billiard room before calling it a night. Pen Y Bryn Lodge (7) Room-7, Facilities-6, Service-7, Wow-0.

We then continued north to Oamaru, another gold rush boomtown famous for its stone, which was used for most of the grand buildings in the South Island. (This is now the fourth gold rush boomtown we've seen in the South Island. I think the tourism authorities may be overplaying this story a bit, as the whole island seems to be portrayed as a gold rush). We had lunch at the Bridge Cafe, which serves huge portions to huge customers. We then walked around the city for a couple of hours. I think we were the only tourists, but it's actually a semi-interesting town, with a real (albeit only a century old) historic center.

56. Oamaru

On Friday we started our return trip north. Made a brief stop at Moeraki, to see the Moeraki boulders, large perfect spheres imbedded in the beach. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for the phenomenon, but to my ignorant mind it's pretty freaky.

We walked back through the University of Otago's pretty campus. It was final exam time, but students didn't seem particularly stressed. We then had lunch at a packed outdoor cafe near campus called Ordellos, then walked into the CBD via George Street, the main shopping street. After revisiting the gym, we had a drink at the surprisingly trendy looking (but empty) hotel bar, then went to dinner at Abalone, a similarly trendy looking restaurant with an industrial feel to it. Very cool, good looking wait staff, which was a first for NZ, but menu had a total of ten items, of which five were unavailable. The few remaining items were pretty good, but then again they should be as the kitchen has plenty of practice making them. Went back for a late night gamble where Somchai lost his previous night's winnings, so looks like I'm back to being a wage slave.

We then walked a bit out of town to hang out at the Botanical Gardens. I have a lot more pics than words about this, so here goes...

On Thursday, we walked around Dunedin in beautiful weather, and found the city very likeable. It's got a real city core that feels very urban (that's a good thing) with lots of impressive Victorian architecture and some trendy shops and restaurants as well. The morning started with a great breakfast at Tangente, a hip slackers' cafe. We then walked to the Octagon, the city's focal point with major churches and government buildings, then to the Victorian train station.

55. Dunedin

We got to Dunedin around 4 pm, which felt like a pretty big city and, at first impression, pretty ugly. We checked into our hotel, the Southern Cross, which I thought would be horrible but was actually OK. It's a big modern hotel in the city center, although it does have a nice older section as well. The lobby is quite stylish and the rooms are pretty big, but very bland and weirdly configured. We went to their crummy gym, had dinner at Etrusco's, a large atmospheric restaurant serving good Italian food, and returned to the hotel to play in their ornate casino, restored from the original hotel. Somchai won about $75, so I quit my job and we're living off his winnings. Southern Cross (3) Room-3, Facilities-3, Service-2, Wow-1 (a thriving casino was a quite a surprise)