Australia - Sydney, Melbourne, Cairns and Port Douglas

While Sydney and Melbourne were great cities, the highlighs of the trip for me were all experienced in Cairns and Port Douglas, namely:

- Eating kangaroo, crocodile and barramundi
- Diving and doing underwater photography on the Great Barrier Reef

- Catching a magnificent 92cm long Barramundi

- Driving the twisty road between Cairns and Port Douglas and back. Our Vauxhall hatchback may have not had much horsepower but it was lightweight, the wheels were close to the corners and it had a stick-shift, all of which added up to a ton of fun barreling into corners along this beautiful coastal road. To top it all, any time we turned off the road towards the ocean, we had a beautiful stretch of beach all to ourselves! Only problem being you couldn't go into the water because saltwater crocs were supposedly everywhere.

Sri Lanka

What a gem of a country Sri Lanka is! Natural beauty aside, it has the highest literacy rate in South Asia (92%), and breathtaking religious harmony (for the time being - knock on wood). More than once did I spy a Hindu or Buddhist temple sharing a wall with a church or a masjid. With the civil war over, tourists are flocking to the island - over 40% of the travellers I saw at the airport both when coming and going were caucasian tourists - and construction of new resorts is booming. Sri Lanka is beginning to cash its peace dividend and the checks are only going to get larger as the tourism infrastructure develops.

I was in Sri Lanka for work, facilitating a regional conference on grid interactive utility scale wind power for South Asia. Delegates from 8 countries as well as numerous turbine vendors, banks and engineering consultants attended. All in all it was a big success and several sizeable deals were struck.

However, that didn't leave much time to do tourism-type stuff. I basically was only able to see Columbo and Puttalam (because we toured a wind farm near there), both on the Western coast. In the future I'd like to go to Kandy and see both the Southern and Northern coasts.

When I went, the war against the LTTE had ended within the last year. Security was still very high. My car from the airport to the hotel was stopped at 4 seperate checkposts by what looked like military police. Even once inside Colombo, I saw far more armed uniformed men than I'm accustomed to.