Both the Fox Glacier and the Franz Josef Glacier are two of New Zealand's biggest tourist attractions and are only about 25km apart. We had planned to visit the Fox Glacier, but on arrival we'd found out that the road there had been washed out during the heavy rains the previous week. We headed up the road to Franz Josef, but found out from the information centre that all tours onto the glacier were booked out for the next few days. This was of course because everyone was now coming to Franz Josef instead of Fox. By some remarkable stroke of [View Full Entry]

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The distance from Queenstown to Milford Sound, our next destination, is only about 50km in a straight line, but the drive there is 305km. All of our drives had been quite spectacular so far, but this one was a cut above the rest. Heading south past Lake Wakatipu we drove through to Mossburn then headed east to Te Anau and then North. We stopped in Mossburn for supplies. It had one shop. When the shopkeeper found that we were heading to Te Anau she told us that we'd like it much more than Queenstown because Queenstown was "such a rat race". [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Christchurch looking forward to seeing our friends Liam and Eila, who we met in South America. We were also looking forward to being in a country which didn't have a "scam the tourist" mentality. New Zealand is the only country I have been to that has a dress code. Due to bio-security, they won't let you take in dirty shoes in case you bring in any foreign pests/plants, etc. The result for us was that our hiking boots (which had just taken us up Mount Kinabalu in Borneo) were cleaned by a nice customs officer. They looked almost [View Full Entry]

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The entrance to Singapore is formidable. Whilst on the Malaysian side there is just a small office, once across the 1km long causeway we enter the Woodlands immigration centre in Singapore. It feels a little like being back in China. They have built an unnecessarily huge building at an enormous cost, but it is still really inefficient, taking about half an hour to get through. Even Cambodia was quicker than this! As with Hong Kong, Singapore is a lot bigger than I realised. Our bus took over an hour to drive the 20km or so to Little India on the East [View Full Entry]

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Now it was time for the hard bit of our trip, climbing South-East Asia's tallest mountain Mount Kinabalu. It's 4,095 metres (13,435 ft) making climbers susceptible to altitude sickness. Whereas in Peru we climbed higher on the Inca Trail, we were acclimatised to the altitude, here we went from sea level to the peak in under 22 hours. The first day involved taking a bus from the port town of Kota Kinabalu up to the start point of the walk at 1800 metres above sea level. Although the walk to our overnight hostel was only 6km, it was unrelentingly steep, taking [View Full Entry]

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I fell asleep on the plane in the way to Borneo. When I woke up and looked out the window I could see the greenery of the Borneo jungle stretching to the horizon. After watching for a few minutes, however, I noticed that the trees were all in suspiciously straight lines. It turns out that I was looking at a vast palm oil plantation. It was probably rainforest a few years ago. We landed at Sandakan airport in Sabah, one of the Malaysian parts of Borneo, accompanied by a South African rugby team. We later found out that there was an [View Full Entry]

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Through some vouchers I'd acquired from work, we were able to stay in a nice hotel in Kuala Lumpur (KL). By the time our train arrived in KL everything was closed and we ended up ordering room service. This was such a novelty on this trip that we took photos when it arrived! On our first day we wandered through the historical centre of the city. We walked through Merdeka Square which was where Malaysia declared independence from the British. It's quite ironic, though, that the square is actually a cricket pitch - you can't get much more colonial British than [View Full Entry]

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From the Perhentian Islands we took the "Jungle Train" from the Northern end of the Malaysian Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur (KL). We had to spend a night in a tiny town called Tanah Mereh from where we picked up the train the next morning. The only other two western people in town were a French guy and an American who were also taking the train. There was only one small hostel in the town which looked like it had never been cleaned. We wiled away the hours here learning a French dice game called Yams and we also played a bit [View Full Entry]

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On our first morning in Malaysia we woke up as illegal immigrants in a brothel. It wasn't the best start. It all started going wrong the evening before when our bus in Thailand was late getting to the border with Malaysia. It dropped us off at the border crossing at 8:50pm giving us just 10 minutes before the border closed. We were hurried along by Thai officials who said we had enough time to get across. So, having officially exited Thailand we set off across the 200 metre bridge that connected the two countries. Behind us we heard the huge iron [View Full Entry]

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From Koh Pah Nyang we crossed over the Thailand peninsular to the island of Koh Phi Phi in the Andaman Sea. Phi Phi is actually two islands (Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Leh) and is famous for being the setting for the film The Beach and for tragically feeling the full force of the Asian Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. The main inhabited island - Phi Phi Don - is effectively two islands joined together by a large, permanent sandbar, upon which the main town is built. It therefore has a beach on both sides of the town. In the [View Full Entry]

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