Boys club was off again on its annual snowboarding trip, but this time the number of Basingstoke originals had dwindled and new recruits Bennett, Diamond and Tommy has swelled the ranks so we were back up to eight people. Given the dire snow reports from around Europe for the whole season, we'd left our booking late and gone for Les Arcs, a high altitude resort stretching up to well over 3,200m with decent snow conditions virtually guaranteed on these upper reaches. The chalet was the now required self catering option, but this time we'd gone for a chalet apartment type vibe, a self contained 8 person chalet within a much larger chalet building with shared communal facilities such as the sauna, steam and swimming pool (which were most welcome at the end of each day!!). Once ... read more

My now pretty much annual autumn trip to escape a cold, dark, wet November London this time took me to Vietnam for a couple of weeks, with an layover in Hong Kong. It also meant being on a proper airline for the first time in a couple of years! Its amazing how being served a meal with alcohol and having plenty of legroom improves your mood! I only had a day and a half in hong Kong, so just time to get a feel. I was staying in a guesthouse in the (in)famous Chungking Mansions, an enormous building containing literally hundreds of identikit guesthouses. With space at such a premium in Hong Kong, these tiny en-suite rooms offer some of the cheapest accommodation available, especially considering their amazing location right in the heart of Kowloon. However, ... read more

March saw the Baso boys on our hopefully now annual snowboarding trip. We were slightly down on numbers from Moss' stag do the previous year, but there were still 6 of us to hit the slopes (quite often literally and face-first!). All six of us were snowboarding this time, and we'd decided to do away with the self-catered efforts of last year and go for maximum ease with a fully catered chalet, that also included unlimited wine with dinner! Coupled with the fact that the chalet was about two minutes walk from the slopes it looked like it was going to be maximum results from minimum effort!! Our early morning flight meant that even after we had got sorted and the chalet and picked up our boards and gear, we still had the first afternoon to ... read more

Using up great slabs of my precious holiday days is something I do with aplomb. My desire to keep visiting the swathes of SE Asia that I didn't manage to get to on my travels meant that Autumn 2009 saw the best part of 3 weeks being spent in Borneo. I'd roped in Steve and Chris to recreate the travelling trio from our first trip to SE Asia in 2005, and Sky was teaching English just a short hop away in Taiwan and was able to join us for a week too. I'd treated the trip very much as a backpacking adventure, but with a budget that meant we could stay in nicer places, take extra taxis and not skimp on the food or more importantly the tiger beer. In keeping with the backpacker feel I ... read more

We had originally been hoping to do the three peaks challenge for Mandi's birthday, but when we realised we didn't have any friends stupid enough to volunteer to do the massive amounts of driving involved we decided on a cut down version, with a 2-peaks challenge being the filling in a three day road trip sandwich. We roped in Fleur and Ed and soon enough we were rocking northwards for the Lake District on a sunny Friday morning in August. There were only three of us in the hire car for the initial leg, Ed would be getting the fast train to Penrith to meet us in the Lakes on Friday night. The weather had been good to us and we'd tucked into a sunny pub lunch next to the canal in Mandi's home town of ... read more