Another month and another blog. We’re still in India and Jen’s foot is still in a cast. We left Varanasi, India’s holy city, and travelled north to Rishikesh. The Beatles put the place on the map in the 60’s when they stayed at the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The town is considered the yoga capital of the world so we too stayed at an ashram and did twice daily yoga classes, the first starting at 06:00. We would have liked it more except for the poses where we had to roar like a tiger or pant like a dog. [View Full Entry]

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It seems like we’ve done so much since our last blog! After the Everest trek we took a few days to travel to Pokhara, stopping at the beautiful, out of the way village, of Bandipur where we were pummelled by two whopping big storms. We know it’s a cliché but the hailstones really were the size if golf balls, we got caught in an open field and they hurt like hell. 2 hours later, when we finally made it back to the village the locals had swept up the hailstones from the street and the kids were building little snowmen. We [View Full Entry]

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We last wrote to you on our way to peninsular Malaysia. We had planned to spend 3 or 4 weeks there but it was incredibly hot and humid and not that interesting. There are a few photos at the bottom of Melaka and Kuala Lumpur but, basically, we left Malaysia 2 weeks early and what we really want to tell you about are the last 3 fantastic weeks in Nepal. We arrived in Kathmandu in the Middle of April and spent a few days soaking up a new country and seeing the sights. The city has daily power cuts while [View Full Entry]

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Thought we’d give you a quick update on the past few weeks in Laos… As you know, we did southern Laos on our bikes and we loved it so much that we thought we’d come and see northern Laos too. It’s more developed than the south and consequently gets more tourists so we’ve been more like regular backpackers since the last update. We crossed the Thai-Loas border at Houay Xay and got a slow boat down the Mekong River to Luang Prubang. We’d heard great things about the 2 day journey and it sounded idyllic, romantic even. However, it was [View Full Entry]

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We’ve flogged the bikes! We did everything we wanted to do with them so we emailed a couple of cycle tour holiday companies in Krabi, Southern Thailand and sold them to a chap named Vern. He’s just starting a new cycling business with his Thai girlfriend and we hope they’ve gone to a good home. Krabi has beautiful countryside and limestone karsts and is world famous for it’s rock climbing so we did a bit in a small beach area called Railay. Nick now thinks he’s Spiderman. From Krabi we went further south and crossed into Malaysia. Georgetown on Penang Isl [View Full Entry]

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We’re still alive! 3 countries and god knows how many miles we’ve rode or strange beds we’ve slept in since we last updated the blog! We left you in Nha Trang, Vietnam where we enjoyed some R&R time off the bikes. We did proper tourist things and even had a mud bath to cleanse the Vietnamese road grime away. Nick claims it took years off him (yeah right!) From there we escaped to Dalat. A lovely town in the highlands where the French used to go in colonial times to get away from the heat on the coast. The town still [View Full Entry]

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It’s been over a month since our last blog update and this reflects the small out of the way places we’ve been staying at on our cycling tour (good internet connections have been scarce). We bought our bikes in Bangkok and cycled Northeast towards Laos stopping in places like Ayuthaya, Lop Buri, and Nang Rang. We saw many crumbling old temples, one of them overrun by monkeys who jumped on Nick to steal is apple. (Jen didn’t know if Nick was more frightened of the monkeys or the prospect of loosing his apple). We cycled across the Thai-Laos border at Chong [View Full Entry]

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It seems ages since we last wrote to you and we’ve covered several countries since our last update. We flew to Singapore on Nick’s birthday and celebrated with a few in-flight Singapore slings. The city was predictably hot, humid and occasionally sterile but we also saw a different side. With Krishna temples in the middle of Chinatown, Buddhist temples in Little India, huge sky scrappers towering over poverty, and strong Malay, Chinese and western influences we found the city to be full of contrasts and great food. We saw the sights and filled our stomachs with cheap scoff from [View Full Entry]

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It wasn’t that long ago that we told you about Australia and, now that we’re about to leave for Singapore, we thought we’d finish the Australian leg of the tour with an update of the last couple of weeks. We arrived in Alice Springs to be greeted by 34 degree heat, buzzing pesky flies and the French and Irish friends we met on the East Coast. Alice is slap bang in the middle of the Australian Desert and so 2 days of thunder storms and huge hail stones were the last thing we expected! It‘s also miles from anywhere and we [View Full Entry]

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So we last updated you from Hervey Bay when we were about to leave for Frazer Island, the largest sand island in the world. We got together with 8 other random backpackers and hired a 4x4 between us complete with all the camping gear. The Island has no tarmac roads and it didn’t matter who was driving, we got stuck in the sand and often had to get out and push. That was all part of the fun and we spent 3 days there, driving around, camping on the beach and having a laugh. The island is truly beautiful, particularly the [View Full Entry]

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