To be honest at the start of the trip, Lee and I were going to give Saigon a miss. Turns out though that Andrew Lloyd Webber already did it 30 years ago. Thangyouverymuch, I'm here 'til Thursday. Due to our extra time in Hanoi waiting on our trip to Halong Bay, we had to miss out a few of the delights that lie on Vietnam's coastline and we decided to fly south to Saigon straight from Hanoi. Given everything we know now, we would have headed straight to Saigon instead of going to the North first but 20/20 hindsight is indeed [View Full Entry]

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This is the place that James Bond Island (in Thailand) wants to be. If you don't know the name Ha Long Bay then you'll definitely know the place when you see it. It's featured in a couple of JB movies and probably countless others, and I reckon Judith Chalmers has been round here a few times when she was doing the Holiday programme. It's one of the most distinctive looking areas anywhere in the world and as such has been accorded World Heritage Site status so that it will be preserved for years to come, and this is a good thing, [View Full Entry]

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I think it's about time we realise that no matter how much you plan something, there will always be a spanner lying about just waiting to lobbed into the works. Now normally, Lee and I just rock up at immigration, say "Sawardee Kap, G'Day, Sin Chao" or however else you say hello, and they welcome us with open arms to their lovely countries, no rubber gloves necessary. We're not used to having to buy a 1 month visa to go somewhere so it was kinda at the last minute that we arranged our visitors visa's to Vietnam. I mean like 36 [View Full Entry]

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I think Lee and I have gotten travel-lazy since we've been in Australia. You get used to not having the backpack on and you get comfortable because you know how everything works and it's all cool. Coming back to Thailand, we appeared to have forgotten everything we had learned on our last trip here. The taxi from the airport to the hotel cost more than it did last time for a start and it appeared that other things had also escaped our attention also. We only had a couple of days on Bangkok this time as our time was limited and [View Full Entry]

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Here it is, our final week in Sydney and in Australia. Now we don't want you all to get offended or anything when we say this, but we don't really want to go !! Don't get us wrong, it'll be great seeing everyone again and we've missed you all heaps while we've been away but, you know how it is, it feels like we're leaving home again !! And you don't leave home again without having a leaving do again, do you ?? Actually I'll come to that in a minute. For some strange reason, you can only work for the [View Full Entry]

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And that was that. Our time in Sydney was almost over. Rosie, Phil, Lee and I basically started making plans for leaving Australia and the next stage of our journeys. Rosie and Phil were heading off to New Zealand for a fortnight, then back to Melbourne and would be heading back to Ireland in October via Hawaii and Los Angeles and Lee and I would be making our way home via Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Africa and then to the South of France to meet Lee’s parents for a fortnight and have a nice two week rest from all this travelling. [View Full Entry]

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Now as previously mentioned in our other blogs, we have of course been keeping up to date on the pantomime, sorry, football season back home. We have checked the scores of our beloved Hearts each week and comfort from the fact that we have not been there to witness some of our performances, and yet more comfort still that we have been spared the many ingenious and witty comments from the Wee (flair) Team. Starved of a successful and entertaining team in Maroon to support, I have transferred a small part (albeit temporarily) of my allegiances to the Brisbane Broncos, of [View Full Entry]

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Everything we have done for the last three months has been the last time we will see this or the last time we will do that, before we leave. This month, it would be the last time that either of us would have a birthday in Australia. It was to have been a joint birthday party, as Claire has the same birthday as Lee, however Claire was leaving us to go to New Zealand a few days before the big day but this did mean that Lee had May 9 2008 all to herself. Lee hired a 3 bedroom house up [View Full Entry]

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There weren’t many of us left by this stage. Liam and Jim had returned from the far reaches of Victoria where they had been working and playing cricket for about 2 months and had saved not very much but were determined to go home with pretty much nothing. Their idea was to spend their remaining cash supplies in their final 3 days in Sydney and to honest they made a fair bash at it. Lee and I had offered to put them up at our house for a couple of nights to save them money and the first thing they did [View Full Entry]

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The other thing that happened this month was our 7th anniversary. Our actual anniversary was back in February but we celebrated it this month. Now I don’t know if there is a precious metal, significant material or even a name that is attached to this important milestone but for the purposes of this blog we shall call it our “LOUD” anniversary. Lee and I had chatted about how we would like to spend our anniversary and had decided that we would have a nice night out in Sydney with a nice meal and a bottle of wine as we were going [View Full Entry]

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