Well, this is the last day of our adventure. We fly to London tomorrow and my family are meeting us at Heathrow.

We have tried to explore Hong Kong but the weather has been against us. Every day the temperature has been in the high thirties, with the humidity at between 60 and 70%. We can only manage a few minutes in the sunlight before we have to retreat into the safety of an airconditioned shop. The contrast between extreme heat and deep chill is giving both of us a cold. Yesterday, I had heatstroke....

Still, we have been out - visiting a buddhist temple, travelling up on the Peak Tram (sloping up to 27 degrees off the horizontal) to look out over Hong Kong island, and browsing museums and art galleries. Also, we've tried to go shopping (Kowloon has the biggest shopping mall in the world) but we seem to be completely out of practice. We spent three hours walking up and down, only to emerge with just a book and two trashy magazines.

Linda is developing a bump now. Her nausea seems to have gone completely. We are both getting used to the idea that we are going to have a baby. It will be an interesting year ahead of us.

(this blog should have been posted a few days ago but there were some problems with our blogger template so we were unable to do so)

So now to our time in Sydney. I am afraid that we were terribly lazy in Sydney. Perhaps this is because we have both been there before and perhaps a little because we are coming to the end of our holiday and have run out of steam.

We were hospitably put up by Angela Fowler who I met when I was contracting at FICS and was sent out to Sydney. Incidentally she is now Angela McNamara as she got married last week. She was in fact getting married to Greg and enjoying her honeymoon in Tasmania when we arrived. So we dog sat (and cat sat) for a few days until they got back on Monday. It was lovely to see her again and her dogs are just adorable. They are border collies and very people friendly and entertaining.

Shamefully we spent most of our time wandering around the mall. We both got our hair done on the first afternoon as Steve's was all shaggy and my two tone frizz needed sorting out. The next day we had our appointment at Sydney Ultrasound For Women and I spent most of Friday morning feeling very anxious and worried about the whole thing. By the time we had done the ultrasound and waited for the report to be written up for our doctor in the UK it was already mid afternoon and we spent the afternoon wandering around the shops and contemplating being parents.

We were more touristic on Saturday and ventured into town for quite a full day. We did all the usual Sydney stuff but Steve chickened out of doing the Bridgeclimb despite all my encouragement. I, of course, was exempt from this activity due to pregnancy......The excitement of a full day's activity wore us out and we just lazed around on Sunday reading and playing with the dogs. I had a look at some of Angela's pregnancy books (Angela is also pregnant - 23 weeks at the time that we were there) and the birth pictures just make me close my eyes and gulp (even Steve crossed his legs and looked a bit green after looking at the pictures). Childbirth is quite a frightening thought.

On Monday we headed back to the mall and used the internet connections in the public library. It is free which was good, and the connection was a reasonable speed. We also saw the movie "Minority Report". Very stylish and slick looking and not a bad story although the film was half an hour too long. I enjoyed it and thought it was good but Steve thinks it deserves more praise than that.

The next few days involved more wandering around and being generally lethargic. The bizarre thing being that despite exerting minimal energy during the day we seem to head off to bed fairly early absolutely tired out!

On Thursday we headed to Hong Kong. The flight was practically empty (less than a third full) which was great. Lots of space for everyone. Hong Kong itself has jumpstarted us into doing more things. It is sufficiently different to everywhere else we have been to reignite our energy but not too difficult to get about. The only thing is that it is incredibly hot and humid (34 degrees celcius today) and just walking along the street for 10 minutes wears you out. Still the HSBC Mega Hong Kong sale is on and we must soldier on with the long term goal of saving money.....

(This is a joint post).

First, we'd like to thank everyone for their kind congratulations about our impending child. We'll try to contact everyone by email, but access to the internet hasn't been great up to now. (At the moment we are in the Kowloon Hotel in Hong Kong and have internet access from our tiny hotel room.)

Fiji. I don't think we really saw much of Fiji. Certainly we just passed through fairly quickly, hardly stopping outside of the resort/hotel/airport.

We arrived in Nadi airport at about 3am. Our onward flight to Teveuni was not till 8am. Fortunately, we were picking up our ticket from a travel agency and they let us sleep on their sofa for a few hours. Well, Linda slept on the sofa and I made do with the floor. Pregnancy has its privileges ... (I think if I had made a move for the sofa, it would have been very health-threatening.)

(Interestingly - well, almost interesting - the name "Nadi" is pronounced "Nandi". This derives from the early missionaries who tried to write the Polynesian language using one letter for each sound/syllable. So "d" comes out as "nd" and "g" comes out as "ng". There are some more bizarre examples of this, so that the most inoccuous looking name has the most unlikely pronunciation.)

Returning to our check-in, after weighing our luggage, the clerk asked us each to stand on the scales with our handluggage! This was a first for both of us. Made us a bit worried about the reason why we had to do this. Linda's theory was that the plane we would be catching was very small and they needed to make sure it had enough fuel.

When they came to collect us, we realised that she was absolutely correct. Our tripropellor plane could only accomodate twelve people, on six double seats. The cabin was not pressurised and there was no separate pilot's cockpit. In fact, it was fun to read the instruments over the crew's shoulders. Almost like playing with "Flight Simulator".

We took a boat over to the Rainbow Reef Resort and were welcomed by a dozen people, singing to us from the beach. As you can imagine, we were delighted...

There was only two other couples at the resort. So we had a very quiet time. We had been upgraded to the Hibiscus Cottage - which had a separate living room - I think because we had booked directly rather than as part of a package deal. The same thing happened at the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort, probably for the same reason.

We had a good time at the resort, though it's difficult to desvcribe it. We seemed to spend the vast majority of our time on sunbeds next to the beach, reading any books we could get our hand.

We went snorkelling one day over the reef. The boat dropped us at one end and the current pulled us through. It felt as if we were flying, with no effort at all. The fish were smaller than in Bora Bora, but much more varied. And the coral itself was a spectacular range of colours - yellow, white, brown, green, purple and blue. We saw a shark (a 2 metre white tipped reef shark) about five metres from us. Linda swam away from it so fast that her upper body came up out of the water. Once I'd got back to the boat (about eight minutes after Linda, despite swimming flat out to try to keep up with her) I chided her for her cowardice. She explained that although we'd seen closer sharks in French Polynesia, we didn't have a responsible adult here to look after us.

We also went snorkelling outside our room (no sharks, fortunately) and I went kayaking whilst Linda floated on her lilo.

The last couple of days at the resort were marred by bad weather. A deep depression south east of New Zealand was causing dangerously high swells over Fiji. There were many weather warnings about this on the radio. We never saw the predicted six metre waves, but the heavy cloud cover caused some depression in the Hibiscus cottage.

We flew back to Nadi airport at about 10 am and we didn't fly on to Australia until 8.25 am the next day. So we decide to stay in the Raffles Gateway hotel just opposite the airport. This is a nice hotel, with much bigger rooms than we expected (and worse food). A highlight for Linda was the presence of a whole load of extremely burly men - the Tongan rugby team were in town for an international against Fiji. No Jonah Lomu, but she didn't seem too disappointed ...

I'll post up a report of Fiji soon, but first: very important news

Eight years after a doctor told us that we couldn't have children (and after we'd decided, for various reasons, not to seek infertility treatment), as we approach our tenth wedding anniversary, we are both very surprised and delighted to announce that around the 6th January 2003 we will be welcoming a third person to our family.

Linda is currently 14 weeks pregnant (out of forty). The delay in announcing our news is due to the unexpected nature of the pregnancy. All of the symptoms were attributed to travel upsetting the system.

Yesterday we had a scan in Sydney and the baby is fine - it was amazing to see this tiny (7.66 cm) baby wriggling around inside Linda - arching its back and then rolling from side to side, before falling fast asleep. The clarity of the pictures was astounding - when we get to a scanner we'll put them up on this site.

As this is a complete surprise, this pregnancy sent us into a panic - we had to rush out and buy books about having a baby to find out the most basic things (like how to change a nappy etc) also we spent a while worrying about all the things we'd done since conception in La Paz (e.g. drinking excessively on the Skorpios cruise, being thrown around on the dolphin watching trip etc). Still the nurse doing the scan assured us that the baby is developing fine. Now Linda has become "paranoid pregnant" woman and does nothing at all that might endanger the baby.

Estimated delivery date is 6th January 2003, and we have decided to cut short this holiday and return to the UK in about ten days. We'll send another five days here in Australia, go to Hong Kong to shop for six days and then fly directly back to London. We're both a bit sad about missing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but there is so much to do and such little time to do it in.

Needless to say, we are both ecstatic about the news.