Hi everyone. After a long summer of rest in New Zealand we are finally settled and have signed a lease on a property in Bondi Junction, Sydney. Thanks to all the friends and family that put us up during this time :-) Simon has started work already, with a Sydney based patent attorney practice, while Sandra has been doing the logistics for us - house hunting and finding out where all the essential stuff that we need is. We have certainly been feeling the absence of the Warehouse's big red sheds as you have to do a bit of hunting around [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from Cape Town at the end of the road for our year of traveling. Over the last week and a bit we have been steadily heading south, with our last stop after Swakopmund in Namibia being the Namib desert. We took a dune walk with a local bushman guide into the dune fields where the Tsauchab River is blocked by the world's largest sand dunes. The dunes are progressively marching inwards towards the mountains as successive adjacent dunes join up across the river bed when dry. This creates small pockets of dead trees every thousand years or so as [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from Swakopmund, Namibia. Since leaving Victoria Falls a couple of weeks ago we have now finished the westward leg of our journey and are on the Atlantic coast in the old German colony town of Swakopmund. On our way here we initially had a brief stop at Botswana's Chobe national park (Thebe river). Here we had an evening cruise up the river into the national park, this stop was unfortunately only very brief as we were back on the road the following day. However, this cruise gave us a taste of the start of the rainy season as we [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from Livingstone and Victoria Falls, Zambia. Since leaving Zanzibar we have been steadily traveling south by west, encountering Malawi first after leaving Tanzania. We have been doing quite a bit of driving over the last couple of weeks, but along the way in Malawi we had the opportunity to stop at a number of local villages. At one place in particular we were able to consult with the local witch doctor for his take on how our futures will pan out. We were each ushered into a dark mud brick hut individually, to consult the man along with his [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone from Zanzibar, Tanzania. As expected, internet connections are few and far between in East Africa, and when you get your hands on one, it is usually rather slow :-( We have been going at a real breakneck speed for the last two weeks since our tour with Absolute Africa started. This is the only leg of our world tour that we are doing via package and we are still getting to grips with group travel, and the speed at which the tour is running. We were really surprised on day 1 to find our truck roll up completely empty, [View Full Entry]

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Hi everybody, we have now come to the end of our time in Egypt. Since our last post we grabbed an overnight bus from Luxor to the Sinai peninsular, stopping initially at Sharm El-Sheikh to look into some diving options for Simon. We heard that Sharm was a bit of a strange place, being the Russian package tourists beach resort of choice. We were certainly not disappointed in this as we found everything really overpriced and overrun by hordes of heavy and pale Russians. We stayed at the cheapest place that we could find as most accommodation in town was at [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone. We are about half way through our stop in Egypt, having just completed a felucca trip down the Nile, and taken in the sights of Luxor. Fairly exhausted after being deposited in Aswan by a very late sleeper train (at lunchtime), we grabbed an afternoon tour of the local sights, including the main draw card - Philae Temple. This was the first temple on our Egyptian tour which impressed us both with the scope of the columns and the incredibly well preserved nature of the carvings. This entire Temple had been removed from its original location on Philae Island [View Full Entry]

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Hello from Egypt. We have now fled the drizzle of northern Europe to arrive to 35+ degree temperatures and cloudless blue skies. Since we last posted we had a good week trotting around London, picking up the last bits and pieces we need for Africa, as well as enjoying the welcome hospitality of friends and family in the city. Suitably refreshed after some time sitting inside on a couch and binging on satellite TV we were rearing to go when the time for our flight to Egypt arrived. We arrived at 2am to find the streets of Cairo alive with locals [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, we have now pretty much finished the third leg of our tour with our return to London. From Berlin, we zoomed straight across the industrialised north of Europe stopping for some well earned R & R in Amsterdam. We chilled out wandering the canals for a few days taking in the Rijksmuseum, while soaking up the atmosphere of the Red Light district and bingeing on street servings of fries doused in mayonnaise :-) We stayed at one of our more unique camping ground stops, which was quite central, but resembled more of a university quad and student union buildings [View Full Entry]

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Hi, since our last posting we have continued our travels through eastern and central Europe, in particular taking in Vienna in Austria, Krakow in Poland, Prague in the Czech Republic, finally finishing up in Berlin. Vienna had on display all the monumental buildings from the Hapsburg's dynasty's time in power in Europe. We wandered around the Hoffberg palace complex and unfortunately learnt that the Spanish Riding School as well as all the opera singers were on holiday for the following three weeks :-( We did however delve into the Empress 'Sissi' museum as well as spending some time chec [View Full Entry]

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