My trip through America consisted of four days in New York, flying to Denver, then catching the California Zephr train to San Francisco, where I had a couple of days before flying home to Auckland. New York was choice! Much grittier and grungier than I had imagined it. It all seemed so familiar yet so, well, cool. I've never seen such tall buildings and long streets. It definitely worked it's charm on me. I ate bagels and coffee (regular please!) with gusto for most of my time there, and between bagels I managed to catch two gigs - The Clean and [View Full Entry]

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Just a few pictures of our time in Portugal in November 2007. [View Full Entry]

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Ireland. Who isn't part Irish? No-one that's who. In Italy, being of fairly dark complexion, I had to get used to people assuming I was Italian and hurling a barrage of indecipherable language at me, and having to shrug and say, "Me non parlo Italiano!" In Ireland, it was Sarah's turn to be mistaken as a local, and have people hurl indecipherable language at her. From our arrival at the non-existant town of Shannon on the Western coast of the Island, we hopped into a rental car and tuned the radio to a Gaelic station and had Irish jigs as road [View Full Entry]

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We've been in London since the end of July. Filling our nostrils with black soot, stomping through concrete streets, being shunted through underground tunnels, working on the recruitment for an investment bank, serving Lords, Russian oligarchs, and celebrity chefs fine wine, and getting on with whining about everything, as you do here. But in all of this there have been short visions of splendour - weekends. Which we have spent rushing around trying to cram in as much fresh air, greenery and loveliness as possible. Kew Gardens was a highlight, it is a very posh, well manicured huge park of law [View Full Entry]

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Our "last hoorah" of proper travel before we get to Londo has been a trip, mostly on trains, through Eastern and Central Europe. Enough countries that we have to take a second's pause to search our mind before we can say which country we are in. Our last blog was in Northern Romania. As our hostel owner explained, Sighetu Marmatieu's main industry was smuggling. Many people- often old ladies- cross the bridge into Ukraine, buy cartons of cigarettes, return and sell them at a profit. Since the Ukraine cigarette prices were so much cheaper, those old ladies could make a pretty [View Full Entry]

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Lonely Planet said 'Travel no further - you have found what you are looking for' about the Maramures region of Romania. This surprised me because I hadn't emailed them about my love affair with Romania rural, peasant, horse and cart culture, but somehow they knew that this was exactly what I was looking for in Romania. They described the Maramures region as having a thriving peasant community, shit loads of horses and carts and a remarkable isolation from 20th and in fact 19th century practices, technology and fashion, due to the Carpathian mountain range that surrounded it. Modernity hadn [View Full Entry]

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Hello! Xavier and I have spent most of the last month wwoofing on two vineyards in Tuscany - just what we needed after being in those big crazy european cities. 'Wwoofing' is 'willing workers on organic farms', which means you work on farms in return for food and board, a really great way to travel and experience life in the country. For us it turned out to be perfect and a lovely way to slow down and feel at home. Our first farm was near a charming little hilltop village Riparbella in central Tuscany - owned by Ursula and Sigusmund Hadelich [View Full Entry]

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Russia. Whatsthatabout? It managed to be every cliche thats ever been thrown at it, and more. We had to come to terms with a country that wasn't quite so offay with the 'tourism' thing, which became apparent in the St Petersburg airport which is like a dour primary school shrouded in thick accents which were unfortunately not speaking English. When we asked where an ATM was they seemed deeply shocked. Our first evening in St Petersburg plunged us straight into the atmosphere of a Dostoevsky novel. The woman at our hostel spoke no English, we walked up a incredibly sinister stairway [View Full Entry]

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After a funny little 12 hour interlude in Frankfurt airport where we enjoyed our first meal in Germany of luncheon sausage and cheese slices bathed in extra mayo we landed in Berlin. A very very cool city. We stayed at "John and David's Cozy Little Backbacker Hostel". The young man who checked us in was an indication that things were going to be a little different in the continent of Europe. Asia - or at least where we've been in it - is in many ways extremely conservative. After 4 months we had almost forgotten what alternative culture looked like, but [View Full Entry]

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Its four months now that we've been travelling - a whole third of a year. The past 3 weeks we've been taking a holiday from our holiday before we choof off to Europe. We've spent almost every single day of it lying on a beach reading, and every day we wake up and grin about the fact that we're still not bored, still enjoying doing absolutely nothing and that the biggest problem facing us is how to get on and off a lilo, and dodging falling coconuts. That, and avoiding SNAKES! Some background first. For most of India, definitely Vietnam (they [View Full Entry]

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