You know there's nothing to erase the euphoria of an overseas trip than a visit to Moomba to work. I've been here for a week so far, and it looks like I still have a week to go, which is a difficult prospect to swallow at this point I have to say.

The tourism and marketing people call the Strzelecki desert (home to the conglomeration of leaky steel pipes that is Moomba) a "sensitive arid ecosystem". I guess thats because "vast bloody desert with nothing to look at except the 300 flies that buzz around your face all day" doesn't have the same ring to it. The fact that I have been to glorious places like Interlaken only make it worse, and make me feel sorry for the people I see driving around this god forsaken wasteland with caravans on thier holidays.

My boss told me I was coming here to supervise an intelligent pigging (or In line inspection, ILI, if you want to use the cool acronym) program. He should have told me I was coming up here to do an exercise in debacle management. The worst thing about it is that some of the things that have gone wrong would make blogging gold, but might be career limiting for me if I publish them on the internet.

But enough complaining. I have started a new blog for that. Waxing Cynical. I know I put this in my last post as a side project, but any of you who clicked the link got a 404 error. There was a good reason for this, that being I have been prevented from accessing blogger.com for the last few weeks to actually make an entry. Why? You're just going to have to go over there and find out.

So the holiday is over, and don't I know it.

It took nearly a week for us to fully recover from the trip, I was in asleep by 8:30 everynight for at least a few days. This long recovery would have been fine, except that I had to go back to work to start to pay for the whole junket.

Thus the thud!

It is seriously like I never left. I was back for less than a week before I was back on the plane to sunny Club Moomba resort. The heat, the sand, the flies and the bain marie of death all make Moomba the holiday destination of choice for discerning masochists.

And sadly that's about as much as I've got to say about assimilating back into normal life. It really hasn't been exciting enough to report on. Don't despair though, because this blog is getting an evil twin.

From now on, this blog will be used to report fun stuff that we are up to, and my incessant rants will now move to a self indulgent little place called...

Waxing Cynical, at http://waxingcynical.blogspot.com.

Ok, not to sell the last few days of our massive overseas Odyssey short, but we are home now safe and sound so its time to wrap this baby up. We did some fun stuff in these last three places, and for the minor stuff you're just going to have to take my word for it. I do still have some stuff I'd like to share, so here follows a highlights package - enjoy.

1. Revelstoke.

A couple of highlights here. The first notable thing was Roger Pass, which is really just a bloody high road that is susceptible to avalanches. Apparently up to 40 a day in the winter so they say. The road has avalanche roofs on it as well which is cool.

We also went for a spot of go-karting, at a go kart park run by real life red necks. I have to admit it was almost as much fun humming "dueling banjos" as it was driving the karts.

2. Kelowna.

More real life red necks here at a flea market we went to. I bought a Han Solo figurine and a book of Letterman top 10 lists.

Kelowna is home to Lake Okanagan, which is apparently one of National Geographic's top ten lakes in the world. Top ten on what grounds I am not sure, but there you go. We went on a 3 hour houseboat trip on the lake which was cool, especially for Karen, who went for a swim in 11 degree water!

3. Vancouver.

Vancouver is a large wonderful city, with great attractions such as Granville Island and Stanley Park, but the two stories I am going to tell you strangely involve openly gay men.

The first was that on two mornings we had breakfast in Vancouvers very famous celebrity hangout, The Elbow Room Cafe. This is a fun joint, run by a couple of very funny old queens, where the gimmick is that they abuse you. Seriously, you go in there and they call you names, in the style of Carson! Comedy gold. The funniest thing was that we told them we were from New Zealand, so had a giggle as they made jokes about the land of the long white cloud! Eventually we let on that we were actually from Australia, but by then it was too late. Possibly the funniest moment was when Karen asked the waiter what he recommended, and he answered "It's not on the menu, sweetheart"

The other story was our viewing of the AFL grand final. It turned out that the only bar showing the game was a bar called "Sugar Daddy's". Call it holiday fatigue or whatever, but for some reason the name didn't ring any alarm bells for me until we got there and met the very nice gentlemen who drank there. I can't say there was anything wrong with the place, but watching the AFL grand final, on a Friday night, in a Canadian gay bar was possibly the most surreal experience of my life.

So that was it. We had a quick lunch with Karen's friends Mark and Sarah on our last day and then caught the plane home.

And then we woke up and it was all a dream......

One of the cool things about the Moose tour that we did, was that you could hop off of it and get on to a later tour if you wanted to spend a bit longer in one of the stops. Ironically, my chief complaint about the Moose network was a lack of available bus space on later tours to make this possible most of the time, but we were fortunate on this occasion to spend some extra time in Banff.

Let me tell you we needed it. After 7 days of running around in the mountains hiking, biking and having snow fights, we were exhausted. The fact that we happened to sample more than one of the local bars on the night we arrived didn't help either.

So our first day in Banff was almost a write off. I mean we did wander through some of the local shops, had a bit of lunch and looked at Bow River (I wonder if its the Bow River from the Cold Chisel song?) . But on the whole, it was pretty lazy.

That night we had dinner at one of the local bars, which wouldn't normally rate a mention except for the fact that I had an elk burger. Not unlike beef really, except it was a bit dear (groan...)

With our batteries recharged, Karen, myself and our bristolian buddy Hannah headed off to attack Sulfur mountain. The walk up the mountain is 5 km and climbs some 700m, which we all agreed that we were on holiday after all and this was probably asking a bit much first thing into the morning. Fortunately though, there is a gondola to the top of the mountain for the less energetic, so we agreed that a good compromise would be to catch the gondola up and then walk down.

Once we got to the top, we were just astounded by how pretty it was. A fresh layer of snow had fallen over night to get everything that 'christmassy' feel, and a mountain that big commands a good view over the town, a couple of large snow capped mountain ranges and associated deep valleys.

And since now I am recalling the last of this holiday from the comfort of my lounge room, I can impress you with a photo!



I will go back and embellish other posts with photos later - I promise...

Anyhow, so having taken in the view and enjoyed the snow, we hiked down the mountain, which was actually not as easy as we thought, it was quite steep and hard on the legs. Nevermind though, because at the end of the walk is the very lovely Banff hot springs, which is basically a hot water swimming pool, overlooking the mountains. It was a magic way to unwind after the walk.

After we were well and truly cooked from the hotsprings, we got into a cab and headed back for the Banff main street. On the way back down the hill however, the driver bought the car to a screaming halt. Why? To let us take a photo of the herd of elk (I think thats the correct collective noun). Not quite the moose we had been hanging to see, but majestic animals nonetheless.

A very late, like 4 o'clock, lunch rounded out our big day in Banff. We basically did little else except sample a few more local bars and pack our stuff, ready to get back on the bus.