Martin Ems

Happy New Year to you all! Ok first things first, before we carry on about what a great time we're having, yadda, yadda, yadda, we too are feeling the post Christmas/January depression. Unfortunately it's not because of the cold and the dark evenings but the fact we're coming home at the end of the month - boo! Obviously we can't wait to catch up with everyone, but we can't believe how quickly these 9 1/2 months have gone. In fact I feel that being away for so long and coming back home in the middle of winter makes our winter blues doubly worse! I tried to persuade Martin that we should stay out longer but unfortunately our money's run out and I have been told that we're "grown ups now and we need to get jobs". ... read more

So we've made it to the north island of New Zealand (don't mean to gloat but it's country number 9!). The Quantas crew again looked after us well on flight from Sydney to Auckland and thankfully there was no turbulence. I have no idea why I have turned into a nervous flyer and you'd never believe that I used to fly every day for a living! On arrival in Auckland we immediately noticed the change of temperature in comparison to Australia and Australia wasn't even that warm! We weren't exactly dressed for the occasion donning shorts and flip flops, or thongs as the aussies call them - guess it sounds a lot more interesting. So there we were in windy Auckland with our thongs on unsuprisingly freezing our butts off! Our first stop was the bar ... read more

Yet again, we have been slated for ludicrously long travel blogs (that we can't do anything about - there's too much to tell!), for sounding like a travel guide and for being rather descriptive. We've been given some words (not mentioning any names.... Aron!) to use that make our descriptions appear more "dramatic", so apologies if we've used any of the words in the wrong context as we have no idea what they mean! Anyway.... After a lovely smooth flight from Alice Springs into sunny Cairns we hopped onto the bus into town. Cairns was absolutely teeming with backpackers and tourists, which made a huge change from the quiet laid back west, but it was great to be back in the hub-bub. After a couple of days of seeing the sights, eating, drinking, walking the bussling ... read more

Hooray we've made it to Darwin! Totting up a grand total of 7780km/5213 miles the equivalent of driving from London to Baghdad and back (if you're crazy enough!) or one way to Beijing! The last blog we were in Coral Bay about half way up the west coast. From there we headed up to the town of Exmouth, but before we left we managed to squeeze in a snorkel with the local manta rays. Exmouth was a great base to explore the Ningaloo Reef armed with only a snorkel and mask. We also did a days SCUBA diving on the reef and made friends with some inquisitive, yet extremely venomous 3 metre sea snakes! (FYI - the venom can paralyze a human in 15 minutes). On the boat journey back we were lucky enough to be ... read more

What an amazing place the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo is! 2 weeks just wasn't enough to take in the amazing scenery, flora, fauna and marine life. We started off in the capital of Kota Kinabalu and used it as a base to explore South East Asia's highest mountain (coming in at almost 14000 ft), Mount Kinabalu. Unfortunately we didn't have the right equipment with us to make the ascent to the top, so instead we ventured around the national park at the bottom of the mountain. Martin also put his vertigo to the test again, by doing yet another tree top walk. This time it was just a rickety rope bridge suspended 41m above the ground! We spent one evening cruising down the Klias wetlands in search of the illusive big nosed Proboscis monkeys ... read more