With my first week in Colombia having been spent on the Caribbean coast, it was only natural for me to want to spend my second week in the mountains... and what better way to shake off the big city cobwebs than by joining a 4-day guided trek through the rainforest-clad lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta – the world's highest coastal mountain range?! But having neglected to take my passport with me to the Expotur office in the centre of Santa Marta when I paid for the trip a couple of days prior, I first had to take a minivan into town on the Monday morning (9thMarch) to take care of this little aside... only to find that the centre of Santa Marta had lost power, so that not only was the office ... read more

Thirty percent of Sarawak's population belong to various indigenous groups known collectively as 'Orang Asli' (meaning 'Upriver People'). Customs, traditions, spiritual beliefs, language and way of life vary from one group to the next, though there are common threads that connect some (or all) of them to each other in different ways. The people who have traditionally lived a nomadic existence in the vicinity of what is now Gunung Mulu National Park identify themselves as the Penan. Interestingly, while the Penan have words for every kind of animal or plant that occurs within the rainforest, they have no specific word for the forest itself: they refer to it simply as 'Tongtana', which roughly translates as 'the world in which we live'. This makes sense given that traditionally the Penan spent their entire lives here, finding everything ... read more

After two weeks on the 'mainland' of the Malay Peninsula, Linda and I took a flight two hours east from Kuala Lumpur to Kuching – the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, and, if the guidebooks were to be believed, the most cosmopolitan city on the world's third-largest island: Borneo. With Linda still putting her insides back together after suffering some serious anxiety during the flight (and in particular the descent) we hopped in a taxi and headed into town, where thankfully our hostel was not only located smack bang in the centre of the city, just one block from the Sarawak River; but also a significant step up in comfort from our two previous hostels in Penang and Melaka. (It took the air conditioner in our room mere minutes to cool the room down ... read more

After five days in the hustle and bustle of Kuala Lumpur, Linda and I took a bus five hours north to Butterworth on the coast, from where a small ferry (with passengers and cars sharing the top deck!) tackled the ten-minute crossing of the North Channel to George Town, on the island of Penang. Despite being uninhabited until around three centuries ago, Penang's past status as a vital port on the trade routes linking Europe, Africa and Asia has endowed it with a historical significance that – along with that of Melaka further south – rivals that of any other town in Malaysia, if not Southeast Asia. Indeed the central cores of both George Town and Melaka have been inscribed on Unesco's list of cultural World Heritage sites. With such a history of trade between empires ... read more

After turning my back on the Thunersee (Friday 6thJuly) for what I assumed would be the last time, I took a train south to Kandersteg and immediately checked into the Hotel des Alpes near the centre of town. My reasons for choosing the Hotel des Alpes over the International Scout Centre (where I had stayed when I passed through Kandersteg twoyears ago) were three-fold: 1) I wouldn't have to walk for twenty minutes out of town to reach my accommodation, 2) I wouldn't have to share the breakfast buffet with a couple of hundred obnoxious teenagers each morning, and 3) I would have a guaranteed venue in which to watch all four World Cup quarter-finals, without even having to go outside... which, with the rain still bucketing down upon my arrival in Kandersteg, would have probably ... read more