Having had our fill of Incas, we decided it was time to leave Lima and fly to Argentina. We now realise that Buenos Aires is an amazing city, but again our first impressions were not great. Our taxi from the airport decided not to drop us off at the door of our hostel but instead three blocks away, muttering something in Spanish and driving off as fast as possible. As we walked towards our hostel (Portal del Sur) in the rain we realised why the taxi driver was so keen to make a quick getaway! Thousands of protestors were marching up [View Full Entry]

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Arriving into Santiago in the early hours of the morning, Claire decided straight away that she did not like South America as she could not speak the language (Spanish) and no-one seemed to speak any English! In contrast Sam's mind was made up five minutes after leaving the airport, when the taxi driver and Sam started discussing various football players using a combination of sign language and Sam's limited Spanish. We stayed in Santiago in the area aptly named the “London quarter” for a day and a half and spent most of that time sleeping and trying to get over the [View Full Entry]

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New Zealand really is a traveller's paradise, it has the countryside, the wildlife and an insane amount of ways to kill yourself aka adrenaline rush adventure sports! We started our journey in Auckland and first impressions was that it was just another city, but thanks to the free STRAY bus tour we appreciated Auckland and the surrounding area for its volcanic beauty and culture. It was while we were on this tour that we got our first taste of New Zealand adrenaline sports but it looked far too dangerous for us youngsters, so a 77 year old Welsh granny took up [View Full Entry]

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So this blog continues in Oz but this time on the west coast! We started our journey by flying back to Darwin. Having already visited there we decided to leave the very next morning and booked online a Greyhound ticket to take us on a 6000km epic journey down to Perth. As we packed our things and readied ourselves, we discovered to our horror that the bus had not been able to leave for the previous 3 days as the whole of northwest Australia (particularly the Kimberleys) was under water - yes summer is also the wet season in Oz! We [View Full Entry]

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We arrived down under into Darwin at the very social hour of 4am in the morning. We were thrilled to finally be in Oz, however it took another 2.5 hours to persuade customs to let Claire bring her chocolate and wooden Christmas decorations into the country… talk about strict custom rules! The heat and humidity in Darwin were hard work, especially when trying to cook in a kitchen the size of a shoebox with no fans or aircon! However it was nice to be able to cook for ourselves again, as hardly any hostels in South East Asia had kitchens and [View Full Entry]

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On our flight to Japan we could hardly believe that we had been away for 3 months already and were embarking on the next stage of our trip! We arrived in Osaka late at night and had to quickly get to grips with the Japanese train system, not as easy as you would think, especially with bags the size of Russia on our backs, but also the fact that our Japanese rail passes were apparently out of date before we even had a chance to use them…ooops! After some great blagging skills we managed to get on our way. The bullet [View Full Entry]

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Well, where to begin.... Instead of booking the 26+ hour bus journey from Hanoi in Vietnam to Vientiane the capital of Laos, we opted to make our own random journey. This involved taking yet another night train to Da Hong (again we booked it rather last minute and so only managed to get a hard sleeper carriage again, which meant sharing with 4 others... who were lovely locals who tried to feed us constantly with the weirdest looking fruit and sweets!). So 13 hours later we eventually arrived in Da Hong and caught a minibus and then a motorbike taxi to [View Full Entry]

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Firstly apologies for taking so long to write this blog entry but in the words of Sam and Jim "we have been caning it "! We left you last in Phnom Penh, from here we traveled down to the south coast of Cambodia to Sihanoukville and for the first afternoon we were very lucky and had gorgeous weather so spent some time on the beach with a few cheeky beers! However, from then on it proceeded to pour down with rain, so after a couple of days we decided to head back to Phnom Penh. From here we headed north to [View Full Entry]

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So we left you in Koh Toa where we then started our long journey back to Bangkok! To help pass the time the bus kindly played a real quality B-rated or should that be Z-rated movie - "The Salena Incident". For those of you who might be interested and I know that's Sam's family read the reviews (www.imdb.com/title/tt0443626). We were wetting ourselves watching it and these reviews pretty much sum it up! So got to Bangkok in the pouring rain and made our way to our favourite guesthouse. We spent a couple of days in Bangkok picking up our Cambodian and [View Full Entry]

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So, where to start... we arrived in Bangkok about 3 weeks ago & headed straight to the backpackers paradise of Koh San Road. We struck it lucky at the My House Guesthouse as it sold porridge to die for and showed good films every night (all for 250 baht per night - 3.5 GBP). Whilst in Bangkok we took a trip out to the floating markets at Damneun Saduak. Although now only around for tourists it was still quite an experience, floating down a river in a canoe with an old Thai chap armed only with a paddle. It was amazing [View Full Entry]

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