Tim and I decided to give up our Sunday and do the Oxfam walk today, which as the name suggests is a walk to raise money for Oxfam. I know doing the walk doesn't really count as travelling but seeing as I am not going on holiday for a while I thought I would write a blog anyway! There has been a bit of a heatwave of late so we had an amazingly sunny day for our walk. It was 13 miles which was a nice distance. It took us 4.5 hours from start to finish including a bit of a [View Full Entry]

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Went on a day trip to Sintra today. Sintra is a town about 30kms away. We got the train which was a bargain €1.65 each way. Why aren't trains at home this cheap? We visited a really cool castle when we were here. It is Palácio da Pena which is this brightly coloured castle high above the town. The architecture was a little bizarre in places (think cartoon castle) but I really liked it. We also explored the town, ate another custard tart and visited the National Palace. This is a medieval palace with 2 of the largest chimneys you have [View Full Entry]

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We are in Lisbon! It is very nice but very hilly so we are exhausted! We never thought we would appreciate the flatness of East Anglia. Due to the hilliness of Lisbon and the fact that most of the streets are very narrow and windy we spend most of our time not being entirely sure where we are! We have had 2 days exploring Lisbon. the first day we went to Belém which is a district that is a 6km away. it is home to a Pastéis de Belém - a shop which is famous for making custard tarts. Needless to [View Full Entry]

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As the title suggests we are back in chilly UK and it only took 25 hours to get here! We had to get up at 5:30am to get a taxi at 6 to go Ko Samui airport. After a very short flight to Bangkok we had to wait 4 hours for our flight back to Heathrow. Luckily we were flying direct. Once we landed it was a further 5 hours before we were finally home. I reconfirmed that I hate Heathrow especially the central bus station. It is always freezing and our bus is always late! We arrived 30 minutes before [View Full Entry]

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The holiday is almost over!! Just got the long trek back to the UK to go (can't wait!) The last day and a half of holiday was spent back on Bophut Beach on Koh Samui. This time we are up the other end of the beach in the fisherman's village which was more to our liking. The hotels are smaller here and there are a lot more places to eat. The other end is a bit too big resorty for my liking. Our hotel is run by an English couple. The woman could be Margo from The good life. She even [View Full Entry]

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We have just have had 3 great days on Koh Tao. When we got off the catermaran (still choppy but not quite as bad as the way over) we all got filtered onto the appropriate bus. The Thais are very organised and they had everyone (at least 150) off the catermaran and on the buses amazingly fast. Once we set off we realised that our mini bus was being driven by a complete manaic! Once we left the pier it soon became apparent that there had been some type of accident and all the traffic was gridlocked in the direction we [View Full Entry]

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Just had 3 great days on Ko Tao which is an island out 45km north of Koh Samui. Getting there was less fun as it took an hour and a half on a very choppy catermaran. The weather was not great and it was very windy. We are staying on Hat Sai Ree which is the main beach. It is 1.7km long so there is plenty of sand! The day we arrived the weather was pretty poor and it rained a lot including a few torrential down pours. We did go for a very wet walk down the beach. It did [View Full Entry]

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We are back in Thailand on the beach portion of our holiday. We arrived here yesterday by the smallest plane so far. This one only had room for 50 passengers and we did not go down the tunnel to get on, there were only 5 steps into the plane and they just flicked out of the plane! It was not too bumpy a flight though and it only took just over an hour to get here. As you have no doubt guessed by the title it is raining here!! To be fair it is more a case of torrential down pour [View Full Entry]

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So we have just had 2 days in Penang and although it was not our favourite place on the trip we had a good time. We did wonder if we were missing something though as everyone else seems to love Penang. To be fair anything would have been a bit of a let down after Luang Prabang. Penang did have some plus points though. Firstly where we were staying was extremily cool. It was a restored Chinese Mansion (Choeng Fatt Tze) that had been converted into a hotel. It is quite a tourist attraction and there were groups of people on [View Full Entry]

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As the title suggests today has been a day of travelling. We left Luang Prabang this morning and got a flight to Bangkok. Bizarely we left about 30 minutes early, lets hope everyone who waned to be on that flight was. For all the bad press that Air Lao gets they were actually ok. The plane did not drop put of the sky, they left on time and we always got our luggage back superquick, although there were only 20 on our flight. We then had to hang about at Bangkok airport why we were waiting to board our flight to [View Full Entry]

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