Jen here... Having left Australia and the Western world behind (for a second time), we landed in Mumbai, India on July 13th. In order to ease ourselves into what we had expected to be the most culturally different country we would visit on this trip, we had reserved 2 nights at the Best Western Mumbai (thanks to the BW card my parents gave us for Christmas!). While it was really nice to be greeted at the airport with a sign with your name on it (especially after a 9 hour plane ride), and be taken by airconditioned taxi to our airconditioned [View Full Entry]

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G'day from Australia, The land down under was: lots of great family, very cool animals, wide open spaces, losing our around the world tickets (oops), and just like home. Andrew here. As we've been horribly behind schedule, we're doing all ten weeks of our Australian adventure in one giant blog to get caught up. We've had to spend a lot of frustrating time recovering many of our blogs because the travelblog web server crashed. We've been able to recover almost everything - only one blog missing! Along the way we also discovered that one of our camera's memory cards decided not [View Full Entry]

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The Milford Track is one of New Zealands 'Great Walks'. It's often described as the finest walk in the world. That's a lot of hype to live up to. We had read some mixed reviews of the experience, so we headed off to see if this place was all that it was advertised to be. It helped that we would be hiking up and over the Mackinnon pass (they even got the spelling right). We were hiking the pass at a very opportune time - just after the booking season ended. The trail is very regulated during the booking season - [View Full Entry]

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Andrew here.... We arrived on New Zealand's south island eager to have a little more free time. Our north island travels had been pretty hectic. We didn't set up the tent in daylight very often. Between late setups and long drives most days, I was getting a little grumpy. I'd enjoyed everything that we did (even the horse show), but I was really looking forward to spending some more time with my feet up enjoying some lazy afternoons. After all, why go camping if you can't enjoy a sunset beer? The ferry deposited us in Picton, on the very northern tip [View Full Entry]

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Andrew here -writing about hiking again! Our only tramping (the kiwi word for hiking) on the North Island was our one-day trip to do the Tongariro Crossing. This is an amazing volcanic landscape, with multiple volacanic cones, both active and dormant. We only had time to do the one day hike, but this worked out to be perfect. The weather had been pretty crappy leading up to our hiking day, making us worried that we weren't going to be able to do this hike. Every guide book (and the local rangers) tell you not to do the hike in poor weather [View Full Entry]

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New Zealand (in the voice of Jen)! We arrived in NZ on Friday, April 13th, having left Santiago 13 hours earlier on Wednesday night - Thursday the 12th disappeared somewhere over the Pacific! Our flight landed at 4 in the morning, so we spent the first 4 hours in English-speaking territory (yeah!) sitting in the airport waiting to call the car rental company (once they opened) to come pick us up. It was here where we finally caved in and had our first McDonald's meal since we left - so bad, but sooo goood! We arranged our car rental with no [View Full Entry]

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Beunos Dias! As many of you have noticed, we're running way behind on getting our blogs published. So the next few will be brief, so that we can get caught up! Andrew here writing this installment, our last in South America. Santiago, Chile....another big city. With the notable exception of Beunos Aires, we had been dissapointed with the capital cities in South America so far. The biggest turnoff is the pollution. You can literally taste the foul air when you arrive, and it sticks in your throat. Our only adventure in this place was to climb up Cerro San Cristobal, the [View Full Entry]

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Our main reason for visiting Pucon, Chile was to climb Volcan Villarrica. Villarrica is one of Chile's most active volcanoes, and is one of only a handful of volcanoes worldwide to have an active lava lake within its crater. We decided to do the early climb, which only one of the twenty or so tour companies offers. We got up at 3:45 am and started climbing at 5:30 so that we could watch the sunrise from the volcano. The sunrise was pretty incredible, as we were well above the clouds by the time the sun was peaking up from the other [View Full Entry]

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Our flight from Punto Arenas landed us in Puerto Montt, Chile. If you've never been to Puerto Montt, don't bother going - it was an ugly little town and after walking away from an accomodation which we had agreed to rent from a lady who approached us in the bus station (it was a room in a family's house that was very sketchy), it was the first time on our trip that I (Jen) was scared walking down the street. Luckily, I had my very tall bodyguard with me, who gave a "don't mess with us look" to anyone who looked [View Full Entry]

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Andrew here... we felt that I should write this one, given that I had a wicked grin from ear to ear for most of our trek. We were finally going to be in the Patagonian mountains!!!! The trekking guide for this area was the first book I bought when we started to plan our year long trip... it was one of the destinations that I was most looking forward to. We got off the bus at the Argentina-Chile border, and were almost blown off our feet. This was our first taste of the incredible winds that hammer the region for most [View Full Entry]

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