Issy's got a really bad cold, which sucks for her. She‘s taking every medication known to man plus some that haven't been invented yet, but all to no avail. I head off along the clifftop path towards Fira town while she rests up. There’s a cruise ship in and it gets progressively more crowded as I proceed. I hear a lady complaining that she has to climb too many steps to get to her hotel; I think that maybe she should have chosen a slightly flatter destination. It's now insanely crowded, and I hear a tour group leader constantly yelling "number one group this way", so that his charges don't all get lost. The whole town is a series of narrow alleyways. I‘ve got a map, but it's not a lot of use because none of ... read more

This is the first time that we will have left our three offspring at home on their own for more than two weeks, and Issy's finding the thought of this very stressful. Emma's not too relaxed about it either, and if Coco knew that his precious mother was about to desert him for two months he'd be howling the house down by now. Troy's gone away with some friends so Scott and Emma drive us to the airport. We find out later that Emma started crying when she got back to the car. We're very glad we didn't know about this at the time; she never cries.... read more

We headed off for a short family sojourn in the Philippines before the start of the academic year. Issy and I had honeymooned there way back in 1989 and hadn't been back since. We relied on our ever reliable travel agent, Family Affair Travel, to make all the arrangements. We hoped they'd done a better job than Thomas Cook, who'd arranged the honeymoon. When us newlyweds went to check in at the Manila hotel they'd booked for us it seems they'd decided in their infinite wisdom that we should be in separate rooms. Each to his own I suppose, but this wasn't quite the sort of honeymoon I'd been looking forward to. I think I remember reading about the collapse of Thomas Cook about a year ago. If they were relying on honeymooners for a lot ... read more

The school and university years had ended so we set off for a two week jaunt in Thailand. We landed in Phuket and were driven an hour or so north to the small beachside town of Khao Lak. The coastal area around the town had been hit harder than any other parts of Thailand in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. The official death toll was around 4,000, but the ever reliable Wikipedia reports that due to lack of reliable census data and the large numbers of undocumented Burmese immigrants it could have been as high as 10,000. There was no shortage of reminders of what had happened here - a tsunami museum, and a brand new early warning system complete with sirens and signs directing people where to go to get to high ground in the ... read more

I think we might have become a bit addicted to Fiji. Then again, what's not to get addicted to - balmy weather, palm fringed beaches, super friendly locals..... OK, so they might have the occasional military coup that makes headlines back home, but the locals know which side their bread's buttered on. The coup leaders leave the tourist hotspots well alone, and any visitors who've been there during any of these so-called uprisings have apparently scarcely been aware that they were even happening. Now I know that if you travel often enough eventually one of your flights is going to be delayed. Our turn had come. We landed in Brisbane to discover that our midnight flight was now not going to leave until 6am. We'd also managed to miss the last transfer bus for the night ... read more