Botley

I was fortunate enough to be offered the chance to travel to New Zealand with work this month. It was a quick trip, fitting a huge amount into our week there. This blog attempts to cover the fantastic seven days in the land of the great white cloud. Thursday 2nd of May I craned and twisted my neck as we began our descent, eager to catch a first glimpse of the North Island as we came in to land in Auckland. The change in body position was a welcome relief after spending the previous 11 hours on the second of our long haul flights. I had left my house in Cardiff about 35 hours earlier, so I was very relieved to have arrived and was looking forward to getting our whistle stop trip around New Zealand’s ... read more

Hello there! There's a pattern developing with the names of these blogs, isn't there? It's time for a recap of all that we've been up to in Indonesia, during the third month of our trip. As you may recall, last time I wrote I was in Kuta waiting for Sinéad to arrive. Arrive she did and after I'd collected her from the airport we headed to the south of Bali to a place called Bingin, where we enjoyed a few days of rest and relaxation, whilst devising a plan for our time here (organised, I know). When the time came to leave Bingin we headed west across Bali, some sea and a chunk of Eastern Java before we were dropped off in a town called Probolinggo at 3am to wake up some hotel staff to ask ... read more

Hello!! It´s my turn! Shin and I agreed that I would write the fourth blog of our trip to round up what we´ve been up to in the first month to any of my fans, I mean friends and family who aren´t up to date with Shin´s blog. I´ll also bring you up to speed with what we´ve been up to since Shin last wrote, which includes me edging one year closer to my retirement from unemployed life by reaching the grand old age of 26. I´ll keep things conventional by starting at the beginning, which was many moons ago in the far off land of Argentina, and more specifically the country´s capital city; Buenos Aires. After a tense wait in Rome to see whether we had missed our thirteen hour connecting flight we arrived completely ... read more

Hello there! How are things going? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Interesting, glad to hear it. I myself am good, well apart from the fact that a large number of winged creatures are currently treating my body as some sort of banquet. Between the title and general Simon Botley knowledge a lot of you will know that I´ve become another year older and wiser since the last time I wrote to you. Once again, to all those people who sent me some sort of Happy Birthday message, thanks very much. It was much appreciated. We´re currently sunning ourselves on Caye Caulker, a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Belize, which is a very long way away from Leon in Nicaragua. The most sensible way to explain how we´ve got here seems to be to carry ... read more

Hello! Or Bula as they say a lot in Fiji. How are we all? Hope everybody is well. Apologies for the fairly massive gap between blogs. I'd planned to do one earlier but I've spent the last 6 days on a tropical Fijian island that only had electricity and water occasionally. So internet was definitely out of the question. As you may have gathered from the title I'm pleased to report that me and Chris's attempt to meet up again was a success. As the time drew nearer I think we both started to think that meeting up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was a fairly ambitious plan for two travellers who have suffered from their fair share of bad luck. But it all passed off without a hitch and we were able to ... read more