Sooprise! It turns out that computers in Africa aren’t all they’re cracked up to be! I am having a difficult time uploading my posts to wordpress, and also doing it on a day that there aren’t rolling blackouts at the internet cafe. As a result, you will be getting my thrilling Addis posts in fits and spurts and will be getting very few pictures. DON’T BE SO GREEDY! The good news is that my thrilling Addis posts will surely change your life and you will become a more insightful and caring person after reading them. Or something.

We arrive in Addis Ababa and expect complete pandemonium, but see none. We cruise through immigration and customs with no problem at all and then grab our bags. The airport is surprisingly quiet, with very few people around, but almost immediately I am struck by the attractiveness of the Ethiopians. Ethiopians are pretty, I whisper to T, and it is a thought I will have a hundred times a day. The women are all eyes and cheekbones, and the men all smiles with bright white teeth.

Our driver, Yidnacachu, meets us with a sign saying AHOPE and takes us to his red van, with us blinking in the lazy sunshine. We sit in the back and T talks to him about football as I look out the window. Addis is a dusty city sprawled across a valley, with faded hills in the distance. The roads are newly paved, thanks to the Chinese, but Yidnacachu repeatedly apologizes when there is a brief patch of dirt road. There are huge piles of boulders alongside the road where the ground has been gutted. I am surprised by the relative quietness of Addis after India, and I like it.

At the guesthouse, we meet Genet, our housekeeper, who is a beautiful 25-year-old with perfect skin and a voice like a song. We also meet Mifta, one of our guards. We are put into a room in the back of the main house, with two huge beds pushed together with clean sheets and soft pillows. We think we like Ethiopia already.

Then the girls come. T had predicted that the other two volunteers would be hot American girls in their 20s, and he wasn’t wrong. B is a sassy 21-year-old from Anaheim, who is working at AHOPE on a missions trip, and M is a 24-year-old English teacher from New Hampshire who T thinks is my other half. We instantly like the girls, which is a good thing, because M is here for another five months, so if we didn’t like her, she would have to go. Lucky for her, we let her stay.

The girls have been having coffee ceremonies every Saturday, and B loves Ethiopian coffee, so we all sit and watch M perform the ceremony. She gently rinses the pale beans in her hands, and then roasts them in what looks like a wok. After the roasting, she bashes them with a mortar and pestle and then we drink. Glass after tiny glass of beautiful, dark Ethiopian coffee. I don’t even like coffee as a rule, but I can’t drink this fast enough. I expect to get all cracked out on the caffeine, but feel no real difference. Of course, staying awake might be proof enough that the coffee works, because I should be passed out from exhaustion by now.

Then, we walk down the road for dinner. The best thing about B and M is that they instantly include us and there is no weirdness about us being old, haggard and married, or brand new. So we go, the four of us and Genet, to a local restaurant. The girls order chickena tibs, which I thought was chicken but is really beef, fasting food (vegetarian dips) and shiro (heaven in my mouth). In Australia, we tried African food a couple of times and T always wrinkled his nose, but in Addis, he chows down big style. Even so, Genet spends the entire meal imploring us to be, be (eat, eat), even when we have our mouths full of food. So much for the weight I lost in India…

At long last, T has gone through our pictures from Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia for your viewing pleasure. I am too lazy to stick them in the individual posts, so instead you get them as a slideshow. Enjoy.

Our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Delhi was on Sri Lankan Airlines, purchased because the flight was cheepy-cheep and we had to get to Delhi somehow. I didn’t know what to think about the airline, mostly because Sri Lanka is in a state of turmoil and a few months ago the Tamil Tigers took over the airport for their own use. So greedy, are those Tigers.

Joy had flown the same flight when she went to Delhi, and she said it was very good: pretty flight attendants, and very clean. Joy was right, but she understated the situation. Sri Lankan Airlines is just about the best airline ever. First of all, the flight attendants weren’t just pretty, they were stunning. T was most pleased with this development. Second, the flight to Colombo was equipped with a camera out the front and down the bottom of the plane, so you could see what the pilots saw and what it looked like going straight down. This was very cool. Third, the food was gret. Easily the best airline food I have ever had: delicious curries and Ceylon tea and all kinds of good stuff. Fourth, the plane to Colombo had in-seat movies, which meant T could play video games the whole time and I could watch the second Elizabeth movie. Hurrah! The flight to Delhi wasn’t as fancy, but it didn’t matter because I was so enamored of the first flight (and I also bought a book in Colombo which I finished on the flight to Delhi, taking up all of my time).

The Colombo airport was teeny tiny, with only a few stores and restaurants. T wouldn’t let me buy any ceramic elephants full of tea because he is MEAN, so I made him promise that in exchange, we would return to Sri Lanka. He foolishly agreed. Ha! I have been in love with Sri Lanka for a long time, and the only reason we didn’t go on this trip was the safety issue. One of the girls who bought our stuff in Melbourne was Sri Lankan and meeting her only made me want to go more. This time, however, we had to make due with drinking some ginger tea in the airport and thinking about how much we wanted to be outside.

Watch out, Sri Lanka: I’ll be back.

After the bizarre taxi ride to the Shanghai airport, T and I checked into our flight to Bangkok. We were flying Air India because it was $200, which we thought was very clever, but everyone we told would look at us in horror and yell, “AIR INDIA?!” as if we had told them we were thinking of taking a helicopter ride over Baghdad, just for fun.

T had warned me that Air India is notorious for being late, so we were not surprised when the gate check woman told us that the flight would be a half hour delayed, AT LEAST. We went through security and then noticed our gate had changed. So, we went to the new gate. Then, the new gate changed, so we waited at the third gate. It was nearly two hours after our scheduled departure before the plane even arrived. At that point, it was 3am and neither one of us was finding the Shanghai airport as charming as we did upon arrival.

The plane ride itself was okay…there was a funny smell on the plane and one of the flight attendants woke me up to see if I wanted my meal (Yes! Of course I want to eat at 4am when I was just sleeping because this stupid flight was delayed by two hours! Give me some naan!), but apart from that it was uneventful.

We managed to get through customs and immigration, and I was sleepwalking my way through the Bangkok airport when some stupid American wanktard drove his cart into my ankle. Oh, homicide was on my mind, but I was too weak from exhaustion to pull the eyeballs from his head, so I just glared at him and staggered into the taxi.

Our hostel in Bangkok had gotten our reservation confused or something, because they only had a single room available, so T and I climbed in and slept for five hours. We awoke to realize our room looked like a cell at Rikers Island, which didn’t really matter because we were leaving on the night bus anyway.

Then we decided to walk into the center to buy our new computer, the ASUS eee. We managed to get a few kilometers before the roads all split and we had to take a taxi. At the electronics mall, we ate some Thai food court food before buying the computer: a precious little munchkin who weighs less than a kilo and cost only $400. Then, it was back into a taxi to go back to the hostel in rush hour.

We grabbed our bags at the hostel and went out to get another taxi, but no one would take us. So, we ended up in a tuktuk that careened its way to the bus station in record time and with minimal terror. Of course, the bus we wanted didn’t leave at 8:30, as we hoped, but at 10: 30, so we were stuck for three hours. We ate at another food court, where I had to abandon my first meal because I was afeered for my life.

Then it was on to the VIP bus. I actually really like Thai VIP buses—they give you blankets and a pillow and the seats recline almost all the way back and they give you nice food and water and it’s really very comfortable. So I didnt mind the 8-hour journey to Nong Khai. This is lucky, because when we arrived in Nong Khai, we couldn’t check into our guest house until 11am, so we ended up chatting with the owner’s wife while drinking tea, then sitting in the restaurant next to a charcoal heater for four more hours. Finally, we had a room, only 36 hours after we first arrived at the Shanghai airport. Travel is truly delightful. Someone, please buy me a private jet. I promise I’ll let you ride in it.

Not only am I back from China, I am also alive, happy and using a brand-new computer! Unfortunately, said computer is a $400 purchase, and thus far, it will not write apostrophes. So, I apologize. I am not a complete moron who cannot tell the difference between plurality and possession, I swear.

Now, get ready for a million new posts.

myrovingeye is now also at myrovingeye.com, so you don’t have to type in all those bothersome extra letters for WordPress. Rejoice!

I am pleased to announce that myrovingeye now has photos, going all the way back to Hanmer Springs. Feel free to enjoy them and to murmur about my enviable photographic abilities. Feel free not to mock me for the fact that the pictures are probably all misaligned and strangely shaped. I’m a writer, not a photo editor!

After leaving Hanmer Springs, we planned to go to Blenheim. What we didn’t realize when we made this plan was that we were leaving Hanmer Springs rather late and that the drive would take approx. 47 years to get to Blenheim. By the time we arrived, it was getting late. Things were closing and we were grouchy. We couldn’t find the motorpark we wanted, and after a spectacular argument (which was of course all T’s fault), we continued on. We found another one, but since I’m 99% sure there were murderers lurking inside the dingy bathrooms waiting to slit my throat with rusty knives, we hightailed it out of there, to stay at the Top 10 tourist park in Blenheim, which was also far from ideal. Why, you ask? There were PEOPLE there. Lots of people. Close to me. People make me twitch. This is never a good situation.

The next day we woke up, had some breakfast and got out of Dodge. The deal was that T would drive and I would winetaste. It sounds like a terrible deal, but it was really okay–mostly for me, and I make the rules. So we started hitting wineries. We went to Cloudy Bay and Allan Scott, where we purchased a pinot gris. We went to a little one whose name I forget, and we tried to go to Hunter’s, but there was a bus tour of doom so we screeched out of there as fast as we could. Then, since I was starting to see double, we decided to do just one more. Little did I know that the final winery would be the one that broke me. The woman working there, Sara Rogerson, was completely delightful and adorable, and the wines were too. I don’t know how many I tasted, but we bought three, and by the time we left, I’m pretty sure I could no longer stand, though T says I was okay. I just remember everything being fuzzy and swaying.

We went straight from Nautilus to an English pub where we ate overly fried food and nachos, in a desperate attempt to soak up all the delicious wine. It worked, kind of. The moral of the story is that Tsssshhooooluckeeeetohavemeeeee.

Some of you might remember the dreaded Bali monkeys of doom from our honeymoon. T and I barely escaped with our lives. Just when I thought we were free from demented monkeys, I read this.

I used to love those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Now, I’m not so sure.