Landover Baptist | Where the Worthwhile Worship. Unsaved Unwelcome.

You gotta check this site out, it is bloody fuuny. I do hope it is a spoof though.

This is Landovers review on 'Return of the King' which they thoughut was the second coming of Christ.

While I am here might as well give you the link to the Skeptic's Annotaed Bible

Colonels Abroad - Sheppard and Kate

Hope you're all well and enjoying the christmas parties etc.

We're now in Australia. We've been here for 2 weeks and done the Queensland coast from Brisbane to Carins, with a few stops in between.

Before we left NZ though we were lucky enough to heli-hike (helicopter ride half way up, walk around for 2 hours and helicopter ride back down) the Franz Josef Glazier. This was well cool. One of the best things we've done. Neither of us had ever been in a helicopter before, so this made it even better.

The weather in Oz is predictably very different from NZ, where it was just like home. I'm slowly adjusting to the intense heat and humidity, although not quickly enough for the missus who is getting annoyed with my obsession of air conditioned places.

We got the greyhound bus up the coast and stopped in Hervey Bay, Airlie Beach and Mission Beach before getting to Cairns. Now, we don't usually do public transport at the best of times, so we found the whole bus thing a bit... well, shit to be honest. The journey broke down into a 6 hour ride, a 13 hour overnight ride (full of 18-21 year olds!! nightmare), a 9 hour ride and a 3 hour ride. What a load of crap!! I never want to see another coach in my life!! At least it got us from a-b I suppose, and it was quite cheap.

Enough of the moaning. You people will begin to think I'm not having fun anymore. Well I am. Australia has been pretty rude so far.

We did a day tour of Fraser Island, which was quality. The guide we had was cool. He just kept taking the mick out of the 'pommies' all day, which was cool because he could take it too. Nice. We saw a dingo pup on the road - well we nearly ran him over anyway. Doh! We saw some sharks in the water too. Cool.

We did a day trip to the reef from Airlie beach that was quality. Kate and I did a dive that was really good. The visibility was amazing and the water was warm! Bit different from Kaikoura! We saw loads of cool fish and of course loads of cool coral
formations. We also did some snokelling and went on a semi-submersible vessel while we were there. All quality.

Our plan in Mission beach was to sky dive, but we didn't organise it very well and didn't have time. Doh! I know you'll be disappointed by this Sheff, but we made a bit of a mess of it and ended up sitting on the beach most of the day instead. During that time we only saw 3 other people on the beach!! It wasn't a small beach either, it must have run a couple of kilometers. Nice! Couldn't go in the water though as
it's stinger season (box jellyfish and the like). We had a really cool place here - a nice little B&B with a pool and a pool table. No other guests, so we had the place to ourselves. Nice.

We had 4 nights in Cairns and did a couple of day trips. We went to the outer reef to do some more snorkelling with a small company called wavelength. This was quality. We went to 3 different sites and saw some amazing things - a small shark kipping on the
ocean floor, a big blue sea star, a green turtle just swimming along (this was the highlight for me, especially as Kate & I were the only ones to see it) and yes, we found Nemo! He was just chilling in his Anenome home. Nice. Well worth it. One thing while I remember though. I don't know whether it will have made the news back home, but a bloke was killed by a shark on the reef near Cairns on Saturday morning. The
spooky thing is that he was on the same reef that we were at 2 days earlier. ARGHH! He was apparently spear fishing though, which is thought to attract the sharks. Doh!

The other tour we did was to the rain forest and the Daintree river. We had a walk through the rainforest and were fortunate enough to see 3 Cassowaries (big, Emu like, birds that are on the endangered list - there are only about 1500 left on the planet). We saw a Dad with 2 chicks from about 10 metres away. Very cool. We also saw some trees that are over 1000 years old. Very strange place this. We had a trip down the river doing some crocodile spotting as part of the tour. We had been warned that we may not see any because it's the wrong time of year really, but we were again really luck and saw 2!! This was really cool. They're really hard to spot, and I think being colour blind helped in some odd way because I was the first to spot both of them. Weird eh.

We're now in Sydney and are looking forward to chlling out for a couple of weeks after our mad dash up the coast. We've got our bridge climb booked for next Tuesday, which we're obviously very excited about!!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Anti-spam screensaver scrapped

It seems everyone was enjoying giving the spammers a bit of their own medicine and the wusses pulled the plug because we were creating havoc with our old vigilante activities.

I only had two PC's working 24/7 on this!!

Colonels Abroad - Grinner and Liz

G'day again Bruces and Shielas

We've just dropped off our campervan and are back in Freemantle area of Perth now for a few days. The whole campervan experience was great up the west coast - definitely seems the best way to travel about around here.

The van itself, although very cheap and basic was a very smooth operator and gave us no grief. The only problem with it was the decor - the company we booked it through over here were called 'wickedcampers' - we didn't think too much of it when we booked, but on arrival at their depot it became clear that they are all individually designed and spray-painted with various daft things written on them.

Ours had the word 'WICKED' grafittied on to the front in big letters, and lovely green flames down each side of the van. To top this the words 'We don't have to be naked to be flamin wicked' (whatever that means?) were grafittied all over the back - so we saw some very bemused faces as we were overtaken chugging up the coastal road. Other than refusing to drive the thing - we just had to laugh. It's amazing the attention we had - mostly teenagers thinking our van really was 'wicked', others thinking we were a bunch of ##@&*^%#'s.

Anyway, that aside the west coast was lovely - the water is so clear and turquoise, lots of kangaroos, wild dolphins, turtles, nice walks etc. Our route went Cerantes, Kalbarri then Shark Bay and Monkey Mia - about 2000kms round trip. The plan was to go further up to Coral Bay and Exmouth, but we spent a bit too long making our way up the coast and ran out of time in then van. Anyhow the drives are a bit dull compared to other places we've been - 100's of km's at a time of very flat, straight roads with the same views everywhere you look (grey road, bit of reddish sand each side, then endless green bush). We've got this freebie Greyhound pass through work so we may go back up there next week and let someone else do the driving... with Namibia and South Africa we've managed about 8000 kms in 6 weeks!!!

Highlight for us was the racing Catamaran (those things can really move!) we sailed on around Shark Bay - dolphins swimming all around in the clear waters - it was fab.
In Freemantle now which is a lovely area by the sea in Perth, here for a few days then who know's after that.

Hope all is well with everyone at home, doesn't feel much like Christmas here as it's so hot, but Santa is bloody everywhere!