The real last stop.... Our flight home was via London so when we got invited to my cousins wedding we decided to stop off for a few days and attend the big event. The wedding was in the Cotswolds, about 2 hours outside London. The Cotswolds is a really nice area- very picturesque. We had a great weekend. The wedding was excellent and I got to catch up with lots of people. It was a lovely way to round off our travels. So after 18 countries, 27 flights and countless bus journeys we are back on Irish soil. We've had a [View Full Entry]

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And so we've reached our last stop.... I was excited about visiting Beijing especially with the countdown to the Olympics well underway. However when we arrived I was surprised that this was the host city for one of the biggest sporting events in the world. With only 80 days to go the city was still like a construction site. A lot of the old buildings in the hutongs were being pulled down and being replaced with new, modern buildings. New hotels, restaurants etc. were in the process of being built everywhere. The strange thing was that many of the construction sites [View Full Entry]

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After 5 weeks in SE Asia we took a flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong. We didn't really know what to expect from Hong Kong as we hadn't done that much research but after spending a few days there I have to say it is a really cool and exciting place and we both really enjoyed it. Perhaps it was the additional western culture! On our first day we went to see the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. Its probably one of the more impressive statues that we've seen in Asia to date and its huge- not too much smaller than [View Full Entry]

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We both had high hopes for Thailand having heard mostly good things.... We took a flight from Luang Probang to Chiang Mai. It was pretty clear as soon as we landed that Thailand was alot wealthier than the last few countries we visited. For the first time since Singapore cars out-numbered bikes and mopeds on the road. Traffic law is in place and is adhered to, and there is no beeping of horns. It seems this was only acceptable in Cambodia and Vietnam. We spent a few days in Chiang Mai wandering around the walled part of the city and losing [View Full Entry]

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We heard enough horror stories about the bus journey from Hanoi to Vientiane to convince us to shell out the extra dollars for a flight. When we arrived the first thing that struck us was how quiet it was- no horns were beeping! Vientiane seemed like a nice city- pretty small, with a population of about 200,000. In fact Laos is pretty sparsely populated compared to Vietnam. There are ~86 million in Vietnam and only ~7 million in Laos. I know Vietnam is bigger but not by that much. The French influence is really obvious in Vientiane with lots and lots [View Full Entry]

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Over the last few weeks I'd say we've developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with Vietnam. We took a bus from Phnom Penh to Saigon. The bus journey was not unlike the one we took within Cambodia although things did improve slightly when we crossed the border. There seemed to be some degree of traffic law in Vietnam, unlike in Cambodia, but the relentless beeping and braking didn't stop. First thing we noticed was that the motor cyclists wore helmets and the number of passengers per bike was rarely more than two. This was a big improvement on things in [View Full Entry]

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And so straight into the heart of south east Asia... We took a flight from Singapore to Siem Reap in the north of Cambodia and this was where the culture shock really happened. I guess it's been fairly straight forward travelling since we arrived in New Zealand. I'd forgotten what it was like to have to repeatedly say 'No thanks' everytime you walk down the street. The tuk-tuk drivers here are like the taxi drivers in Peru- beeping their horns at you all the time. There are so many children begging or trying to sell something or other and like the [View Full Entry]

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So this is going to be a really short entry as we only paid a flying visit to Singapore. We flew from Perth to Singapore last Friday and just spent 2 days in the city. It was definitely a bit of a change from Australia, especially the sparsely populated state of WA. Singapore is a strange city with so many different cultures living side by side. It's a real mix of east and west. The evening we arived we took a stroll around little India and the area north of the river. Little India was cool- very alive. The following day [View Full Entry]

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Well this blog is going to be hard to write.... WA is definitely a cool place but maybe I'm kinda biased now :) We arrived in Perth on Good Friday and to say the place was deserted would be an understatement. I have never seen a city grind to such a halt. Mind you Perth is fairly small by city standards. So anyway most of that day was spent on the internet researching our road trip in WA, while all the time listening to some British guy complaining about the lack of beer that was available. On Saturday we explored a [View Full Entry]

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All refreshed after our holidays, we flew back to Melbourne, picked up a little campervan and hit the road again. It was smaller than our Jucy van in NZ but surprisingly Eddie managed to avoid hitting his head as much as he did when we had her. We headed west from Melbourne towards the Great Ocean Road. Our first stop was Geelong where we spent some time wandering around the pretty waterfront. The larger than life figurines made the walk fairly interesting. There were probably close on 100 of them, each having some significance in Geelongs' history. From there we took [View Full Entry]

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