Hannah and Ben

So here we are, New Zealand. A country steeped in natural beauty, blue skies becoming overcast becoming snow, hot chocolates and coffee and a whole lot of sleeping in a car. Here are a few of the things we’ve been upto. After arriving in Christchurch after what was probably the best flight of my life - incredibly smooth and the view over New Zealand was astounding, we spent the first few nights in Christchurch - getting incredibly cold and so buying thermal layers, jumpers, waterproofs and thick woollen socks before returning to our hostel room complete with electric blanket - a very nice addition! Christchurch was ok, but for a city didn’t seem particularly happening, and it rained freezing cold rain a fair bit so we didn’t see it in the best light. After 3 nights ... read more

Ok, so we're a little behind - have been in Oz for almost 7 weeks.... but here's our adventure up until our flight to Perth.... the rest will follow...err....soon! So we come to our final few weeks in Asia. After a nice few days on Langkawi, enjoying the good weather, our own cooked food and plenty of wildlife, we caught a boat to Penang for Chinese New Year. Maybe we should have researched a little more into it - I only got as far as “Penang has the highest concentration of Chinese in Malaysia so is the best place to experience Chinese New Year celebrations”. What I should have found out is that the first 5 days of CNY and a few days leading up to it everything shuts down and is all about Chinese repaying ... read more

I would like to start with an apology - I wrote most of this blog on Christmas Eve, but due to an unfortunate turn of events I lost the memory stick that it was saved to somewhere in a river in Laos! I know that was a month ago, and we should have published it since then, but we wanted to catch up. Well we finally.... haven't still - but this includes returning to Bangkok now and we will try to get up to date very soon! Thanks for listening... After our long bus trip we arrived just off Khao San Road. We looked at 3 hotels, chose an ok room with hot shower for 700 baht and went for some kebabs and mango shake. The road was buzzing with life and backpackers but apart from ... read more

After an enjoyable couple of days in Saigon, it was time to move on... again. We booked a budget tour from Saigon to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for 3 days and 3 nights. There were about 30 people on the trip so more than we would like, but the tour was cheap, and for what we paid good value for money! We did a couple of trips on the Mekong river, the scenery was beautiful and many children were shouting “hello!” and waving along the river banks. We visited 2 floating markets - the first one we arrived about midday and there was actually nothing left, but we were shown where the market would have been if we had arrived 6 hours earlier! The second we got to about 8am and there were still a few boats ... read more