Gareth and Rhian

After 20 amazing days on the South Island, I jumped on a plane and headed to Auckland to meet up with Rich, Ally and their friend Dom to hire a camper van and travel around the North Island for 25 days! But before they arrived, I had 2 days to spare in Auckland, NZ's biggest city. A quarter of the country's population live here in an urban sprawl bigger in size than London! The remoteness of where I'd been so far in this country was quickly replaced with an identikit city that honestly could be anywhere in the world. However Auckland is unique. It is built upon a field of volcanoes, 60 in total, that mean it could go into meltdown at any time. Only a few of them actually look like volcanoes, many of them ... read more

This part of the trip was one I had been looking forward to since the travel idea's inception. New Zealand. Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. I will start this blog by saying that cutting my Australian experience short by 3 weeks to come to the South Island was one of the best decisions I've made on this journey! I've had such a great time already and it's only been 2 weeks! I landed in Christchurch in the middle of the night (the sacrifice of taking a cheaper flight) and therefore had to sleep in the airport's arrival lounge until a more reasonable hour of the day, when I could get a bus into the city, and to my hostel. This was the plan anyway. Instead I was rudely awoken by the cleaner at 05:30 ... read more

So the Asia leg our the trip is over, and I will be the first one to say that I am going to miss it. I have been lucky enough to have witnessed some of the great sights of the world; the Taj Mahal, The Great Wall, Angkor Wat, Bangkok's Grand Palace, Java's Borobudur monument. As well as the sights there is the diversity, the cultures, the people, the food; all are incredible! This will not be the only time that Asia will be visited by me! The prospect of leaving Asia for the familiarity of Western living in Australia was one that was recieved with mixed feelings. Australia offered great natural sights, they speak my language, and kangaroos, but came at a price. The Aussie dollar was at a record high and climbing, maybe leaving ... read more

I wasn't too sure what to expect of Indonesia. I knew that Bali would be touristy but thought it would be easy enough to escape the crowds. I knew that we had a lot of ground to cover if we were to fit in everything we wanted to see plus the stuff we'd discover for ourselves/people telling us to do AND making it halfway back across Java to fly back to Singapore and onto Australia! So we landed at Bali airport sometime in the afternoon expecting to find a few other tourists there with us but not the 150 or so trying to get through 5 immigration desks. An hour or so later and we'd begrudgingly agreed to what turned out to be an extortionate taxi fare into the nearest town, and the main tourist honeypot, ... read more

Our 6th border crossing of the year. Our first via boat across the Mekong River, the natural divide between Laos/Cambodia and Thailand, from Huay Xai in Laos to Chiang Rai in Thailand. Not wanting to hang around as we'd been on a rather uncomfortable overnight bus to get to the border and were starting to feel weary, we jumped straight onto a minibus and headed to Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city. Not that you'd know it staying there! Our guesthouse was run by a really friendly Swiss guy called Roger (who Rhian reckoned fancied me...we won't talk about that), but he helped us with every need we had, from the best place in town for pizza to where the tourist police office was (ipod loss), top host! We had arranged to meet up with one of ... read more

Hanoi to Nha Trang A brief history of Vietnam.... Vietnam has been a completely different experience to China, even though it was in effect ruled by them for 1000 years before the Viet people took back their country in the 10th Century. The French colonised it in 1885 and managed to keep it up until the First World War. This short period of colonisation was a very significant one in Vietnamese history as the French introduced major cultural changes, bringing in modern education methods and Catholicism became widespread. The following years after the French were evicted were very unstable, with the country effectively being split into two nations, Ho Chi Minh's communist north and the pro-catholic south ruled by Emporer Ngo Dinh Diem. This is where the American's became involved.. aiming to assist in removing the ... read more