Adele and Rob

Friend of ours - yes, it's you Paddy and T - believe in what they call the 'travel gods': a shadowy group of inanimate yet important deities whose job it is to safeguard your passage as you're hoofing it around the globe with a pack on your back. However, judging by the problems that have bedevilled us during the most recent leg of our trip, it would appear that we have done something to get their backs up. We've missed buses, spent a week in the company of the world's worst tour guide, endured The World's Worst Toilets and to cap it all, we're currently stuck in the Chinese equivalent of Milton Keynes courtesy of a mysteriously cancelled sleeper train. For whatever reason, the travel gods are definitely not smiling on us. Urumqi, near China's ... read more

Apologies for the world record-breaking delay since the last blog; it isn't our fault, honest. The internet connection here in Kathmandu is so painfully slow and unreliable that it could make your backside bleed. As a result, this is a disappointingly picture-free entry; you'll have to give your imagination a work-out, I'm afraid. Plus we've been entertaining the family, of which more anon, and thus too busy to write. But above all, we've been in India, the craziest, busiest, noisiest, dirtiest, friendliest, hardest, smelliest, weirdest, most intense destination of our travels, for which ten months on the road did not feel like adequate preparation. To paraphrase the Premiership prince of darkness, Sir Alex Ferguson, 'India: bloody hell.' Old India hands we'd met en route had warned us we would feel like this. We ignored them, naturally ... read more

Happy New Year! According to the Vietnamese we have finally entered 2007 - appropriately for us, it's the Chinese Year of the Pig - and we're in Saigon to watch the last remnants of its new-year Tet festivities being cleared. The celebrations in Vietnam had all of the glassy-eyed derangement of NYE back home, but with a couple of key differences. The party goes on for five days here, as opposed to just one night, and rather than spending their money on rivers of booze, the Vietnamese shell out on several forests' worth of red cards and banners with gold lettering, pig-shaped flower arrangements and ornamental kumquat trees. All very civilised, unlike their penchant for whole-town karaoke contests, but more of this anon. Our time in Vietnam comes to an end today when we take a ... read more

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that 'hell is other people' - an observation which suggests that as well as writing incomprehensible books and smoking too many Gitanes, the French philosopher-king spent at least one of his summer holidays on an organised tour. Having just done the same ourselves, on the several-thousand-mile jaunt from Beijing to Hong Kong, we can only conclude that on this point, 'big J-P' is right on 'l'argent'. The story goes something like this. Last April, back in the days when we both had incomes, a home and much greater regard for our personal hygiene, we were persuaded by a popular London travel firm to sign up for a three-week tour of China. This, our agent confidently predicted, would help us to get the most out of our short time in a big country, ... read more

'Who's running these airwaves, mate - me or you?' They say long-distance international travel blurs the distinctions between places, but there was no doubt that we'd arrived in Australia from the moment we stepped into the minibus at the airport - and into the middle of a massive radio row between a harrassed taxi controller and an equally harrassed driver that had us in stitches (eg 'You took their bags and drove off without them, mate!') despite our mighty jet lag. The row continued pretty much all the way to our hostal downtown, although during it our laughter gave way to repeated sharp intakes of breath as our driver, a talkative and completely deaf chap ('So you're both from Argentina then...?), piloted the bus as if he was completely blind into the bargain. Welcome, then, to ... read more