So… The United States. We count ourselves as being fortunate enough to say that we’re well travelled, so how come the USA or the North American continent for that reason have managed to escape our foot fall? To be honest, there was never anything we wanted to see that was high enough on our ‘list’. There were certainly places on the list, just not high enough to justify spending the money getting there. Faye is pregnant again and was just about to enter her third trimester so it was the perfect time to travel, I’m also being made redundant from work [View Full Entry]

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November '09: Newsflash: The Big Boy is tying the knot again - third time lucky, you might say. And this could be my chance to redeem myself - to offset the mordant humour and persecution of Namibian over the previous blog entries. It could have been, but where is the fun in that?… That terrible old curmudgeon ( my dear old friend, Namibian) is settling, once again, for suffering until death. Well, it shouldn’t last long, then - six more birthdays is the time span I estimate before expiry. Anyway, Namibian is finally making an honest woman out of long-standing partner, [View Full Entry]

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Computer Training in Thuy Lam Hamlet I had two goals this trip, see the mountain areas of Vietnam and participate in library training in a local village and training with the National Library of Vietnam. This blog is about library training. In a country that claims a 95% literacy rate but just a few years ago was 95% illiterate, there is not a culture of reading books. A lot of the provincial libraries and university libraries are full of students but the small village libraries, in my opinion, are not proving their worth. What these small libraries need to do is [View Full Entry]

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With Mbabane offering nothing in the way of information or things to do, I decamp to the nearby Ezulwini Valley. The valley is home to the Swazi royal family and features a mountain that apparently inspired the "Sheba's Breasts" in Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines". A further nod to Rider Haggard is in the fact that one of the nearby restaurants is called Quatermain's. My days in Ezulwini see a climate shift from cold and cloudy to sunny and absolutely roasting - the latter is apparently more seasonal. Having heard about a hostel with a swimming pool in Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, [View Full Entry]

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I left Shimla by bus, and endured a cramped but beautiful 11-hour bus ride through the hills and down to the relatively low-lying state of Uttaranchal. I was heading for Rishikesh, a small town on the holy Ganga river. Rishikesh is a major pilgrimage site for Hindus, being near the source of the Ganga and therefore home to several major temples. It is also known in the west as the place where the Beatles came when they went all weird and spiritual, and today attracts western tourists in their droves, who come to meditate, practice yoga or simply soak up the [View Full Entry]

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Our introduction to the Philippines came as quite a surprise, it started off pretty much as we were imagining with funky jeepneys (converted US army jeeps) running around and typical houses we've seen in most of SE Asia, but as we'd landed in Clark which is about 3 hours North of Manila we were really surprised as we made our approach to this huge capital city. For a country that is among the poorest in Asia, Manila seems to be bucking this trend with some of the hugest billboards we've seen in our lives lining most of the highways through the [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 21 November 2009 - Some friends visited Hanoi, so we rented a taxi and traveled 40km to two villages in Thanh Oai commune. The first village we visited is the Vác village where the locals make bird cages and paper fans. We visited 3 houses and saw the locals drying fans in the sun or making bird cages of different shapes. The next village is more interesting. Our taxi went along the Nhuệ river and we passed by Cự Khê village then stopped at the gate into Cự Đà village. This village is famous for its finely preserved architecture. It [View Full Entry]

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Friday, November 20th Living out here in the bush is great. At night the only sounds are the crashing of the waves in the distance and the occasional call of a Weka. The sun brings electricity and the rain brings water to our lives. We love it here. It already feels like home. Unfortunately the bus is also home to “The Bus-Rat”. In the early hours of the morning he woke us again with his loud gnawing (so technically the only sounds at night are the crashing of the waves in the distance, the occasional call of a Weka and [View Full Entry]

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