In the 3 hour journey from Tokyo to Kyoto it didn't even seem like we'd left Tokyo's suburbs. Japan may have some amazing countryside, but we certainly didn't spot any from our window. Mount Fuji should have been visible, but the weather wasn't playing ball, and you could see about 3 feet out the window. I've dived with better visibility. Whereas Tokyo was mostly muggy and cloudy, we arrived in Kyoto about the same time as a tropical typhoon. Fortunately the city was mostly on the outskirts, so the typhoon mostly manifested itself as torrential rain (albeit the heaviest rain I've [View Full Entry]

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Training to be a Sumo involves pleasure ("eat, you fat feck!"), and pain ("train, you lardy layabout!"), in roughly equal measures. A left over from imperial society, the fledging fatsos are beaten within an inch of their flabby lives by over enthusiastic trainers for indescritions such as: - throwing salt in the wrong part of the ring (unsurprisingly, given their enormous girth, condiments are sacred to the sumo) - having a hair out of place in the Chonmage (the sumo hairstyle of choice - basically the rising sun take on the Croydon facelift) - not looking hot enough in white nappies [View Full Entry]

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Since being in Australia is about as culturally exotic as spending a weekend in Bluewater , we've decided to cut down on the blogging somewhat. I mean, you can get Bitter here, and they won't let you drink on the buses... which kind of detracts from the Indiana Jones spirit. The one exception really is the critters. Australian animals are bonkers. If the loony Intelligent Design brigade were based here and not Rednecks-ville, America, they'd probably have concluded that Jesus T. God had been licking the backs of psychedelic toads (well surely he invented 'em for a reason, eh guys?) befor [View Full Entry]

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Within about 10 minutes of landing in Sydney, a random Aussie guy had heard our English accents and begun berating us about the state of the English cricket team. "When are you gonna bloody beat us, eh?"... and so forth. He was otherwise quite a nice chap, and I hadn't the heart to tell him that I care less about the state of national cricket than your average 14th Century Mongolian peasant cared about the proper blend of ingredients in a Bloody Mary. Two whole minutes after checking in to our disgusting hostel in the red light district of Sydney we [View Full Entry]

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Melbourne: capital of the state of Victoria and Australia's second most populous city, is probably most famous (in Australia) for various sporting events such as the Aussie Grand Prix and the Melbourne Cup, and (outside Australia) for long running daytime soap Neighbours (bet you get the theme tune stuck in your head now... I have). Having never really got into it for more than a couple of weeks during my finals when it was a good excuse for a tea break, we decided to give the famed Ramsay St set tour a miss, but we were assured that none other than [View Full Entry]

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Another good thing about New Zealand: long buses stop every hour and a half or so for 'comfort breaks', and if there is something interesting to see nearby, they give you a few extra minutes to go check it out. On our 9 hour bus marathon from Nelson down to Franz Josef (we're missing coche cama!) we got to stop off to see the Pancake Rocks - crazy rock formations on the coast. Far more picturesque than South Mimms service station. The rocks get their names from the fact that they are in layers and look like piles of pancakes. They [View Full Entry]

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Sounds are a bit like Fjords, apparently. That watery bitch, the Sea, invades the land, flooding river valleys, drowning bunnies, and leaving cows stranded. But it's not all bad! The fish are happy, and you end up with some quite stunning terrain. Like the Queen Charlotte Sound. Just ask Captain Cook. The rum soaked old sea dog spent more time around the Marlborough Sounds than anywhere else in New Zealand, stopping here on 4 separate occasions before coming to a sticky end in the cooking pot of Hawaiian natives. A seasoned explorer, indeed - ba dum! Our own landing in the [View Full Entry]

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New Zealand is about as far as you can get from the UK, so for the final few weeks of our trip, we will be homeward bound the whole way! Despite arriving in Auckland at 3.30am with a cracking case of jetlag brewing, our first impressions of New Zealand have been great. There is a lot to love about the country - everyone is mega friendly and helpful, the scenery is beautiful, the food is amazing, and the place names are just great...the first bus we got on, when the driver read out the list of places he was stopping at, [View Full Entry]

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Well, we're still alive. The record time period between the last blog and this has nothing to do with kidnapping, murder, being caught in bear traps whilst hiking, or turning on each other with swiss army knives in a fit of travel rage over who got the window seat in a 23 hour Andean bus epic. The explanation is far more economically based. Internet in New Zealand is freaking pricey. For New Zealand is where you find us. I was intending to start this blog with the rhetorical question "where have the last 10 months gone?", but really, the whole point [View Full Entry]

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Uyuni, Bolivia is a tourist destination in the loosest sense of the world. The only real reason for coming here is to get in a jeep and drive out again to see the nearby Salar de Uyuni, the world´s largest Salt Flats. We arrived here on the surprisingly comfortable train from Tupiza sometime after midnight, only to be greeted by sub zero temperatures and feral dogs. Originally we´d planned to get straight out of town, but we couldn't bring ourselves to obey the call of the alarm clock in the morning, and instead took to shopping for a tour the following [View Full Entry]

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