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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Day 22 continued (Friday, September 18, 2009) A few hours after leaving Chamonix, we finally arrived in Annecy around 18:00, and were easily able to find Hôtel du Château without any problems. After parking the car in their free lot, we headed into the small hotel, which was slightly rustic, but in a very cute alpine way. Our room had an amazing view of Annecy and all of its colorful tile rooftops. After settling in, we immediately headed into town as both of us were starving. Neither one of us had [View Full Entry]

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DAY 380 It’s Sunday today, but as usual everyone is up and out on harvest duty somewhere on these 6000 acres. I start my day with stripping the bed linen, I see in the laundry that Helen has done the same thing so as she has a huge top loader washing machine I put the whole lot in together. While the washing machine does its thing I have some breakfast. By the time I have finished breakfast, the bed linen is done, so I hang that on the line and put all the towels in, I know, you are thinking how [View Full Entry]

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Nach meinem doch schon etwas wehmütigem Abschied aus der Hotelschicht und den damit verbundenen „Letzten malen, wie Fahrrad fahren auf der Insel, Iberostars, freie Abende“ bin ich nun im RIESIGEN Esquinzo Playa angekommen. Bis ich auf meinem Zimmer bin ist es eine halbe Weltreise und mein Arbeitspool liegt natürlich genau am anderen Ende. Aber die Anlage ist schön und alles unter freiem Himmel. Viele verschiedene Pools und Einrichtungen für jegliche Aktivitäten sind vorhanden. Nach dem ich an meinem freien Tag die Einweisungen erhalten habe und mich auch gleich mal in jede n [View Full Entry]

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The fifth best thing about going to Laos is being able to say that you’ve been. On returning home from your year away, everybody you know will ask just two identical questions of your entire trip, all the detail they can squeeze in before returning to the unrelenting pressures of their busy modern lives: ‘Did you have a good time?’ (Oooh, no. Terrible. I’d much rather have been stuck in the old 9 to 5 like you guys) And secondly, ‘Where was the best place?’ Frankly by now they’ve lost interest already and aren’t terribly bothered b [View Full Entry]

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11th March '09: What is it with the Japanese? It’s a standing joke that their necks support umpteen cameras, but one would hope that the actual pictures might be rather good? Nope. I'd plump for them being dire. And I base my obnoxious generalisation on today's events: Seven Japanese men are standing around the famous statue of Bremen’s town musicians and, one after another, posing next to it. When I say posing, I simply mean standing woodenly, unsmiling. Can you imagine going round to a slideshow in a Tokyo home? I’d rather just see the hotel receipt as proof of a [View Full Entry]

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The great chance we have living in Bangkok is the proximity to so many wonderful places. We certainly did not have the same freedom while living in Shanghai, or let put it on other words, it would have cost us a fortune. Leslie had school holidays on Thursday and Friday . School on Wednesday finishes at 2.30pm...well, we were in our plane by 4pm! And here we are, having a first seafood dinner on the beach of Kamala, Phuket, by 7pm. This time I rented a car for four days as we were going to head north to Khao Lak, and [View Full Entry]

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Crossing from Mozambique to Swaziland is textbook, an efficient but dull sequence of good roads, empty border checkpoints, then even better roads. Though I'm dropped at Manzini and have to take another minibus to reach Mbabane, Swaziland's capital, it's barely midday when I arrive. Mbabane is like being back in England, and I can't imagine just how it ended up being twinned with Fort Worth in Texas. It's cold, dull and misty, and there is a shop just like WH Smith's from where I purchase a copy of the Economist, and could even have had Q if I was so inclined. [View Full Entry]

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