It was just about the shortest day of the year when we left Sydney. A single nine hour flight later and 1) we are in Thailand and 2) it is just about the longest day of the year. After a 36 hour taste of Bangkok we hopped on an Air Asia flight to Chiang Mai and are now about to dig into day 3 of our 5 day long Thai Cooking Course. The first 2 days were a ball and we are looking forward to more eating, cooking and vegetable carving over the next few days. You are invited for Chiang Mai Curry and Papaya Salad when we get home.

Australia is huge.  Phew.  We're back in Sydney after a whirlwind tour around the Eastern half of the country.  (A whirlwind tour takes almost two months, we learned.)  We've now driven the coastline from Cape Tribulation to Adelaide (check out a map, it's really far), joined a bunch of lovely people for a camping tour from Adelaide to Alice Springs, and connected the dots by flying from Alice to Cairns.

Our adventures on the way have ranged from the awe-inspiring to the downright bizarre.  In the former category, we loved seeing dawn stretch from horizon to horizon every day in the Outback, sleeping under the stars in our swags, hiking in the Olgas, the coral of the Great Barrier Reef, the white sand beaches of the Whitsundays, and waking up in a screened-in rainforest hut to a symphony of birds.  For an example of the latter category, check out the pic of Jules with our prize toad at the Cane Toad races in a bar in Cairns!

And in between, we've done a lot of driving.  Along lovely coastlines, through charming small towns and remote forgotten outposts, through plantations of sugarcane and across a thousand miles of desert on a road that hardly turned at all.  Sometimes we loved all that open space--and sometimes we wished we had flown instead!

So we were glad to finally turn in our campervan and put our feet up in Sydney for a while.  It's quite civilized--we saw the symphony perform at the Opera House, ferried to a food and wine festival on a beach across the harbor, and there are no crocodiles.  We've got some little things to sort out (visas, plane tickets, that kind of thing) before we can move on to Bangkok, but we have a whole pile of Southeast Asia guidebooks and will be on our way next week.  Pad Thai and massages on the beach, here we come!

Finally, today we saw a platypus.  They're so much smaller than you'd think!  Than I thought, anyway.  Maybe a couple of feet long including bill and tail.  I thought it would be much bigger, like a little seal.  I think I was misled about this early in life, and it stuck with me.

That's not the only thing they're teaching wrong in schools these days, of course.  For example, do you know that a platypus is NOT the only mammal that lays eggs?  Right.  Meet the echidna (see photo at left).  It lays eggs AND it has a pouch.  Kind of a platypus-kangaroo crossover type of thing, except that it looks like a hedgehog.  Australian mammals are weird.

And did you know that if a kangaroo is pregnant and conditions are bad (not enough food, drought, etc.), her fetus simply stops growing until things look up?  Yup, and then it resumes development and is born in better times.  STRANGE!  But certainly not a bad idea.

Jules and I are in tropical Cairns after a week of Outback adventures--tune in next time for pics of empty deserts!  It's a little like that in the Outback.  We're not sorry to be back in the lush greenery of the tropics.  But, to be fair, some of the desert scenery is really quite spectacular, like that one big rock and stuff.  We liked that.  We spent yesterday snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.  Lovely.  Almost as good as Hawaii.  Tomorrow morning we begin to fulfill Jules' fondest dream of living out of a campervan.  Wish us luck.

Well, we may be incommunicado, but Jules is still taking pictures.  New Zealand is really as gorgeous as it looks in the photos at left.

We finally tore ourselves away from New Zealand to discover Sydney.  Wow!  Here's our new ranking of best-ever cities: Paris, Las Vegas, Seattle, Sydney, Tokyo, Rome, New York.  Or something like that.  Anyway, we loved it.  Go as soon as you get a chance.  We stayed in a dumpy hotel on a block with six charming sidewalk cafes, and tons more in the neighborhood.  Perfect.  It's very WARM here in Australia--perfect sidewalk cafe weather--though everyone keeps apologizing that it's getting to be winter.  We bucked the trend and headed south anyway to road-trip around the coast before heading into the outback for as-yet-undecided adventures.

We've been meeting and staying with people along the way through a fab organization called Servas (www.usservas.org).  This means that Australian people take us into their homes, give us the local skinny, and feed us Vegemite.  It's been lovely.

Next time on coberman.com: pictures of us cuddling baby wombats.  They are the cutest things EVER!

Miss us?  We were distracted by the PENGUINS!  Did you even KNOW that there were penguins in NZ?  I love them.  Every night we go at dusk to watch for them waddling out of the ocean.  Sometimes we even SEE some, and that is really exciting.

We enjoyed a week with the Cohen parents and many of Monique's friends in Raumati and Wellington, then a whirlwind tour of South Island highlights with the Lieberman parents, which took us down the windswept West Coast, into the sunny central lakes country, and then we think we visited Milford Sound and the surrounding Fiordland--but we're not sure because it was so foggy that we couldn't see a thing.  Except dolphins!  We saw lots of dolphins. 

On our own again, we spent a couple of days hiking on the Routeburn track, then continued making our way around the coast of the South Island.  The scenery everywhere is striking, and strikingly different--tropical, then dry, then rolling grasslands.  Gorgeous.

Must run because the penguins come ashore shortly and we'd hate to miss them.

Quick note: I have put a bunch of photos up in albums on the left. They go back to the begining of our trip. Enjoy.

Continuing our water oriented theme we recently spent four days walking / hiking / tramping / trekking down the length of the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. A water taxi dropped us off at the top of the track and we spent four glorious days strolling down beaches, wading through estuaries, swimming in the ocean, hiking ridges and generally enjoying the spectacular scenery. Each night we stayed in one of the huts along the trail, cooked our supper on our hired campstove and tried desperately to avoid getting any more sandfly bites. Aside from one torrential downpour that we missed because we arrived at the hut early that day, the weather co-operated fully.

Our house in Seattle is tiny, has thin walls and is generally charming. Imagine taking our house (similar construction etc), decorating it with a beach motif, reducing it to half the size and plopping it down on a bluff with a picture postcard view out over the Tasman Sea. You have a fair sense of my grandparents bach (beach house) in Raumati. We just finished spending four extremely eventful days there, busily running on the beach, playing cards, cooking, reading and winding down from our hike. Super, super, super.

We have been on the water recently.  The Pacific Ocean, the Tasman Sea, the Marlbourough Sounds, some assorted rivers and lakes.  The project of spending time near water is a favorite of ours, and we've been attending to it diligently.  Sometimes we hike over a saddle to a hidden beach (where the locals promise that we'll see NOBODY, which is true--but there's nobody on the other beaches, either, so...?).  Sometimes we kayak upriver or out to sea around the bays.  Sometimes we sit on the rocks, or sand, or boat, or whatever, and think about how beautiful it is.  One day we visited Jules' grandmother's beach house.  We'll go back there.  Sometimes we read in the shade.  Sometimes we pull green-lipped mussels off the rocks for dinner and then Jules paddles the rowboat to the oyster patch.  This of course makes him rapturous.  Sometimes we swim, even though it's COLD.  So that's what it's been like.

This morning we were collected by the water taxi for a 45-minute ride back to civilization from the vacation home we'd been enjoying in the Sounds (thanks, David!), and tonight we're temporarily sleeping away from the sound of the waves.  Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we head out (by water taxi, again) for a 4-day hike along the northern tip of the South Island in the Abel Tasman park.  It's supposed to be an easy walk with gorgeous views and lots of beach opportunities.  Just our speed.

Welll we came for summer and so far have been treated to a damp welcome. After a few lovely warm days in Auckland the weather has turned against us and we have had a week or so of warm, damp cloudy days. Folks say that it is a tropical weather pattern. Feels a lot like Seattle in June to us.

However, the weather isn't getting us down and we have spent the last week touring the Northland (above Auckland). We were a bit unprepared for how tropical this part of New Zealand looks and is. Palm trees, tree ferns (i love tree ferns!), banana trees, orange trees all grow everywhere here. The coastlines are spectacular and we are enjoying exploring their nooks and crannies. Photos and ephemera to follow :)

We now have a cell phone. The number in NZ is 64 21 159 7418. The 64 is the country code and the rest is area code / phone number. Give us a buzz if you like :) We'd love to hear from you.

Plan to visit the Cook Islands on your next vacation.  I don’t understand why the place isn’t crawling with Americans.  It’s gorgeous, it’s unspoiled, it’s cheap, it’s easy to get there, they speak English, and the lagoon is like (salty) bathwater.  More specifically, go to Aitutaki.

Justin and Kristin went last year to scope the place out for us (thanks, guys!).  They found the gem of a hideout where we recommend you stay when you go: the Matriki Beach Huts.  Look at the picture below to see how far from the water we slept.  Not far.  And if you walked onto the beach from our door, the snorkeling was amazing as soon as the water got deep enough to fit your face under.  We spent our days swimming, walking on the beach, napping in the shade, eating fresh fish, and then repeating.  Perfect.

Other highlights included learning to ride motorscooters--on the wrong side of the road, no less.  It took about 30 minutes to cruise around the entire island, with coconut-fringed beach views all the way.  One day we ventured even farther afield on a tour of the lagoon, visiting perfect white-sand islets and snorkeling.  Do you know that giant clams exist?  They do.  They’re so big you can’t fit your arms around them.  Weird.  At noon a local fisherman pulled up to the boat with his morning’s catch, which our captain BBQ’d for lunch for the six of us.  I should also add enjoying tropical fruit to our list of island activities:  passionfruit, bananas, lychees, rambutans, coconut, breadfruit, papaya, watermelon, and star fruit.  Did I mention that it’s summer down here?

So you might have noticed that we’ve been remiss in keeping you up to date, but that’s really not our fault.  In addition to the inevitable Island Slowdown that makes it difficult to type more than a word or two per minute, we were cut off from the world because some satellite went down, leaving the islands without phone or internet (or any, really) communication with the outside world.  It seems that some folks were worried about this, since it’s cyclone season and they like to get weather reports at this time of year, but we just considered it part of the blissful silence of vacation.  Now we’ve arrived in ultramodern New Zealand, though, so we don’t anticipate any further technical difficulties for the time being.

When we got off the plane in Tahiti there were ukeleles playing and a woman tucked a flower behind my ear.  It was 3:30 a.m.  It's been getting better ever since. 

We've been here on Huahine for long enough to see everthing there is, twice.  We considered moving along to Bora Bora (which is my view from where I'm typing) but figured a tropical island paradise is a tropical island paradise and plus, it's too hot to move much.  This is more the climate for drinking beers on the beach, which seems to be the primary local tourist pastime.

For a taste of the tropics, do the following (we learned this yesterday): get a drink with an umbrella in it.  Marinate chunks of fresh tuna in seawater, then toss them with the juice of many limes, salt, fresh-squeezed coconut milk, and veggies from your garden.  Add pepper and tobasco to taste.  Eat it with your fingers out of a banana leaf.

We spent the three days around New Year's with friends from LA in a beach rental in Cayucos California--- just north of San Luis Obispo. As far as we can tell this is our 4th new year's oceanfront beach rental in the last 5 years. The others have been the Newport, OR, Orcas, WA and Cambria, CA. As with other years this trip included lots of games--- including one fun one that I had never played before (Rummikub!), walks out on the headlands and a good deal of cooking. Between these three and the good friends it was certainly my idea of a lovely three-day break from the city.

This stop marks the first real "destination" in the trip. From here it is south to LA and then west across the Pacific on Saturday :)

You know how when you have a party and it takes a little while for the true paty atmosphere to really get going? Not at our going away party. Some charming people threw us a farewell party at Seattle's Best Karaoke. It turns out that when you have a party in a little room with couches and Karaoke hardware the party atmosphere occurs instantly. Super fun. :)

It turns out that with a bit of elbow grease, heartache, craigslist and a shoehorn it is possible to put the entire contents of a bungalow into a 6x10 foot storage unit. At this point it is full enough that you couldn't put another box into it. There is some chance that you could get another flexible bag of clothes but I'm not sure.

Today is my last day in the office. It is also Emily's last day in her office. I must say that as excited as I am about the trip it is sad to be leaving. Lot of good memories here.