Dave and Allyson's Honeymoon

We arrived home without incident on Friday evening - despite a ridiculously bumpy ride from Hong Kong and a short luggage delay thanks to the strike at Pearson. Ferris was overjoyed to see us, almost as much as I was to see him, but he clearly had a blast with Lisa! Thank you to Lisa for everything!

We had a great weekend catching up with friends and family and are back to work today, with a few thousand photos to sort through. We'll get them down to a management number of favourites before sharing them!

Thanks to everyone for following us along this journey! We had a wonderful time but are glad to be back home!

Well! We're in HK, on our last flight of the journey!

A couple firsts today...Singapore Airlines - what an amazing experience. Fresh warm towels, a menu to choose your own meal, great service and that was all in economy! Second was...the plane was an A380! It's huge and what a smooth flight!

After landing in HK, we had a very speedy trip through the airport and got in a few kms of exercise as the airport is really poorly laid out. But, we're here, and although we have a long trip ahead of us, we're glad to be heading home!

So we've found shelter at Leo's Cafe Bar where I'm awarding Leo the award for best cappuccino of the trip! Congratulations Leo!

So far today, we've borrowed Fei Fei and Tudor's bikes and followed the river into the city. We returned to the apartment to store the bikes and headed out on foot. So far, we've had chicken rice for lunch...which is exactly as it sounds, white rice and tender chicken. Then we meandered around China town and stopped into the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, which was beautiful. We emerged from the temple to rain and some crazy thunder, which was then followed by the current downpour. Next up, once the rain let's up a bit, we're going to continue to walk north to the Arab district where we may stop for another coffee because Tudor says one place has the best coffee in Singapore! Later, we'll meet Tudor for dinner and then Fei Fei arrives late tonight from Bangkok so if all goes well, we'll get to see her for a little bit at least!

So we've landed in Singapore, our last stop before home, and made our way to Fei Fei and Tudor's house where we're crashing for two nights. Nothing much to report, but we did hear from our cabbie here that there was a terrorist plot foiled and a bunch of people killed in raids in Bali on Sundays while we were there. Apparently even in the same city! Crazy.

Not sure yet what we've got planned for the next couple days but I'm sure we'll figure something out

OH, but worst of all, my BlackBerry broke. So now I'm mostly out of touch with the world...

So, that was awesome! While Allyson lay in bed, feeling a bit under the weather, I headed to the beach to check out the Nyepi ceremonies.

As I mentioned in the last post, they were all headed to the beach in big processions. All along the beach they set up altars and offerings like shown below.

Each temple has their own area marked with the flags in the picture. Everyone dresses up for the occassion. Best outfits were the little girls with the flower headdresses.

There are loud speakers with people praying and a live "band" provides the background to everything. These guys each play like 1 or two notes only, and there are gongs and bells and somehow it comes out sounding like music.

It was very cool. At one point, all the women started dancing in unison along the beach with the others from their temple, and then took offerings to the ocean!

To top it all off, I got some delicious corn from a street vendor

At this point, it began POURING like I've never seen before. The roads have 2-3" of water covering them. Its crazy. Everything is soaked and the pour costumes on the beach are getting destroyed. This is when I bailed and went back to the comfort of the hotel room for a while