June 2009

Hello everyone,

Since last month's letter, I feel like four years have gone by... In fact, we have, in four weeks, lightly touched four completely different universes; you can find an account of our journey in my travelogue; i'd just like to experience again for you four bright moments on the four different planets I feel I have touched during the fantastic voyage, over two months long, we have made, to shoot new footage, on one part, but also to celebrate our birthdays : Francette's 28 years, and my own 38 years on the fourth of June.

-In Australia, where I've been charmed by the beauty of the city of Sydney, with its parks, avenues, its opera house, magnificent Bondi beach, so close; I also enjoyed the white sands of the Whitsunday islands; but it was in a park near the village of Kuranda, reached via a very long cable car overflying an immense rainforest, that I was able to film an adorable baby kangaroo climbing back up into its mother's pouch, as if saying " This world seems too crual to me, I'd rather watch it from the safety of this comfortable, fur-lined pouch" !

-In the small but more than spectacular island of Palau (well east of the Philippines), we have flown over somptuous karstic formations, whose domes were covered with lush tropical vegetation, and surrounded by turquoise blue lagoons ; we have dived among fish, multicolored soft corals, giant clams over 80 years old (I even managed to sit down inside one of the shells) and lightly caressed harmless jelly fish, who live surprising migrations... inside a lake that's cut from the rest of the world.

-In Japan, we have truly felt we were on another planet, facing the language barreer, but also the details of everyday's life, the menus of the meals in traditional inns : you have absolutely no idea of what you're eating, except when you recognize, for instance, a fish head : mine was a bream's head (a fish related to the dorado), and it occupied the whole plate ! But we found such beauty in the gardens, the temples ans the brief glimpse of a geisha's face

-In Vietnam, last, the explosive encounter of Nature and tradition on one hand (the beautiful preserved city of Hoi An, sumptuous Ha Long bay, which we sailed on board a pretty junk boat, breathtakingly beautiful beaches), and, on the other hand, cataclysmic development : invasive buidings, demented roads that will certainly soon be entirely clogged with millions of motorbikes, paralyzed in giant trafic jams... and, only a few meters away, Vietnam, super and eternal...