Sara Partington & Nick Bullock
We've both quit work to travel the world for 6 months.Sara Nick
Travel Blog Posts
April 2nd 2006
Having had no trouble finding accommodation anywhere in six months, Kyoto finally caught us out and we spent our first day bouncing around tourist offices trying to find accomodation having drawn a blank on the internet. After a very long time we finally ended up in a western style hotel for one night and a Japanese 'Ryokan' for two more. The Ryokan was the full paper walls, roll your bedding out on the floor and try to squeeze your feet into tiny slippers experience and quite entertaining if a bit pricey. Apart from that we saw yet more temples, braved a mechanised sushi restaurant and visited an old shogun's hangout with some very poor tiger paintings ( though in fairness the artists had never actually seen a tiger ). After all that we jumped on a ... read more
March 30th 2006
Osaka is a bit like I'd imagined Tokyo would be. It's a tangle of flyovers, buildings, subterranean malls, neon, arcades and the occasional castle. You can quite easily spend a whole day lost underground. Anyway, we tried shopping but we're pretty rubbish at it and failed to get anything despite walking down a couple of the longest shopping arcades in Japan ( each around 2.5km of covered shops all in a row ). We briefly looked at the castle ( yawn ) and we went to the waterfront where we got very scared on what they almost dare to claim is the world's largest big wheel which did provide a very good view.... read more
March 27th 2006
Kanazawa is quite a nice little city. It has very twee gardens, old samourai houses, some nice shopping streets and a big castle that, like most ancient Japanese structures, has been knocked down and entirely rebuilt ( new is better - no, really it is - how many English castles have lifts ). Anyway, we did our usual wandering about, cooked our traditional eggy vegetable pancake dinner at an Okonomiyaki restaurant, were the only customers at a local bar and jumped up and down a lot to keep warm.... read more
March 25th 2006
Before we left the mountains we decided to spend a day or two in Nagano and its surroundings. We had a quick look at the local temple though we're starting to see a bit of a theme there, so maybe not too many more Japanese temples. The following day we headed out to Yudanaka Onsen famous for its bathing monkeys who seem to live a happy life of mostly sitting in hot springs up a snowy mountain. There were a lot of them and they were very cute especially when they threw poo at Sara. On the way back we stopped at the village of Obuse famous for its chesnuts and wooden pavements where we had a traditional Japanese lunch ( I think ) although Sara always waits until I'm half way through my soup before ... read more
March 21st 2006
Well, it would be rude to go to a mountainous country in winter and not go skiing wouldn't it. So we hopped on a bullet train to Nagano and got a bus to the resort town of Hakuba. We found a nice little place to stay called Snowbeds and the owner kindly lent us a load of ski wear, hats goggles and all. Sara skied and I boarded. We had two days on the slopes of Happo One and one day at resort of Hakuba47. The resorts weren't quite as polished as those we have been to in France - older lifts and less well marked pistes, but it was extremely quiet so no lift queues and the skiing and views were very good. I got to do a few small jumps at the snow board ... read more
March 18th 2006
Arriving in Japan is a bit like returning home having forgotten how to speak and not only become illiterate but completely dyslexic too. Relatively few people speak English, most menus are in japanese - even the prices, outside large cities most ATMs dont take take foreign cards and tourists are a bit of an oddity, most signs are of no use to us and we cant read the maps anyway ( which incidentally have no North is up convention either ). Still, we quite like the place and are getting along just fine. Our first task was to buy some more clothes as our swimshorts and T-shirts did not quite cut it in the northern hemisphere. Besides that, we wandered round a few bits of the surprisingly low-rise city, saw a couple of temples, ordered random ... read more
March 13th 2006
A bus, a plane and three taxis later we were in Hong Kong. We spent three days here mostly just wandering about, going up to the Peak, catching trams and ferrys, visiting free museums, parks, markets etc. I managed to buy a new charger for my camera after mine was stolen from my checked in baggage at Bangkok Airport (Thailand so far being the centre of all world crime). Sara: I think the highlight was probably the science museum, not for any educational reason, but to try the fitness test. You will be pleased to know that we both have low blood pressure (almost too low) and my eye sight's going.... read more
March 9th 2006
A day of travelling took us North East to Kompong Cham via Sukon famous for its tasty Tarantulas. Sara, who had been bragging about her intention to try one, chickened out and didn't even go for a peeled frog. I gallantly decided not to show her up by refraining also. From Kompong Cham we hoped to get a boat to the town of Kratie. Unfortunately it turns out that the boat doesn't run any more so the next day we continued the rest of the way by bus. Kratie is probably most famous for being one of the last hideouts of irrawaddy ( or flat-nosed ) freshwater dolphins. They live in a very localised deep bit of the Mekong here and are very easy to see by boat or even from the shore. They look pretty ... read more
March 6th 2006
Kampot is a quiet little town by the river with the French colonial thing more apparent than most places. Promenades with very French lamp posts etc. The French are still trying hard to keep their language in the second language spot for this country but they've completely failed and most restaurant owners struggle to read their own menus whilst speaking English just fine. Anyway, we decided to go on a day trip to the nearby Bokor Hill Station, a big French resort in it's day on top of the highest mountain in the area with views across miles of coastline all the way to Vietnam. Well... views of a lot of whiteness if the mountain is shrouded in thick fog as it was for us. Still we got to see the ruins looking nice and spooky ... read more
March 3rd 2006
Another bus and we were back at the seaside down in Sihanoukville. We checked into a hotel with a pool and did very little for a few days. Yep, sat by the pool, read a bit, watched our movie channel, watched holidaying Cambodians swim ( generally fully clothed ) and that's about it. We were too lazy to even take any photos. Finally, feeling that we should probably do something we bundled into a share taxi for the three hour journey to Kampot. we paid for the 'whole back seat' of the small Toyota Camry that was the taxi but relented as a fourth person bundled into the front on the drivers lap, valuing our lives higher than our personal space ( It turns out that share taxis generally leave when they have seven passengers, not ... read more
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