That's right, we're in Pakistan - or rather were, having just left after the thick end of three weeks travelling down the spine of the country. And before you start to panic Mum and Dad, don't worry: this was not the land of mujaheddin and fundamentalist madrassas that the English media makes it out to be (not the bits we were in, at any rate). I'd go as far as to say that northern Pakistan is right up there in terms of the countries we've visited, with perhaps the most spectacular scenery of them all. And the journey down the [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Warning: never heed travel advice from a stranger on a plane, particularly if she's doling it out while chucking up into a bag. This may sound like the bleedin' obvious, but it didn't occur to Adele and I until we were three-quarters of the way up a 6400-metre Himalayan peak, kicking our crampons and trying not to contemplate the drops into snowy oblivion on either side of us. Only then did we consider that Annelies - the Dutch stranger on the plane who'd persuaded us that it would be a good idea to climb a mountain - might be not [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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As arrivals into new countries go, this was not the most auspicious. We were about 10 miles into Cambodia when our bus's engine abruptly died and refused to be coaxed back into life. The random pile of belts the driver salvaged from the engine bay suggested that we were going nowhere fast. And so it proved: minutes stretched into hours, the shadows grew longer and we repaired to a bar down the road with our fellow passengers, the better to watch the sunset. There was no point in getting stressed: we'd done enough of that at the border crossing from Vietnam, [View Full Entry]

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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, [View Full Entry]

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Ah, Thailand: like Reading in the Premiership, it's definitely been the surprise package of our trip so far. Before coming here we had been fearing the worst. We'd heard that there were too many tourists (including grubby buggers who don't go there for the temples), too much development and, on the eve of our arrival, a best-not-tell-the-parents bombing campaign in Bangkok. Nevertheless, we were quickly seduced by the place. The climate is great, the scenery gorgeous and the food even better, but the best thing about Thailand is the Thais: a nation of people so cheerful, accommodating and just plain nice [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Difficult to know where to start with this one, really. We'd intended it to be a gentle ramble through the second half of our travels in Australia - sun, sea, scuba-diving, desperately trying not to mention the cricket - but being the lazy sods we are we didn't get around to writing anything before we left the place. And the problem is, even though we've only been in China five minutes, it's been such a gigantic shock to the system that Australia and everything we did there seems a bloody long way away - and not only that, not particularly memorable [View Full Entry]

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'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 [View Full Entry]

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