It had been almost an entire month since I had returned home from a year of frolicking. In my book that spells time for a much-needed, well-deserved holiday. I had no pre-conceptions on where I wanted to go, so I decided the next best thing would be to turn up at the airport and jump on a plane to somewhere or anywhere. Firstly, it’s quite difficult packing for an unknown destination, so I packed light and figured I would buy anything extra I might need on arrival. I logged off at work, got changed in the office and headed for Heathrow. [View Full Entry]

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I came to Rwanda with relatively little knowledge and even less expectations about the place. I knew there had been a recent genocide, I knew there were some gorillas hanging about somewhere, and I knew very little else. But now I’m a little more educated. Rwanda is obviously synonymous with the 1994 genocide. Up to 1.5 million of their people were massacred during a few months of immense bloodshed. Since that tragic scar the nation has progressed at an unbelieveable rate. They do not pretend it never happened and openly face up to the stigma. In 1998, president Kigame took charge, [View Full Entry]

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Entering Malawi, I passed through immigration with such ease it was almost disorientating. Expecting the usual African customs ordeal, it was like being let off school detention. A few revolutions of the pedals down the road towards Lilongwe, I came to yet another Police Road block. You tend to find these every couple of hundred kilometres on the main roads of Africa. Usually I’m left alone to cycle straight past, but this time they stopped me and decided they wanted to take my bike apart. I'm not sure what they were expecting to find. To be honest I think they were [View Full Entry]

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The South African woman working in the British Embassy in Pretoria, who had shockingly bad English despite being employed to represent our Queen and country, handed me my brand spanking new British passport - 32 crisp blank pages of opportunities lay before me. I could now once again visit almost any of the magnificent countries in this world and discover new and forward thinking attitudes. Let's go to Zimbabwe instead, I thought. For a few seconds I wondered whether I should visit Zimbabwe at all. I knew there would be no issues from a safety perspective, but the moral arguments were [View Full Entry]

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I stayed in Johannesburg long enough to realise it was a good place to leave. It was highly recommended not to walk around outside the hostel alone or at night or most other times of the day for that matter. But the biggest and most pleasing surprise was Soweto, a nearby suburb and South Africa's most notorious township. It was incredible how different the reality of Soweto is from its image - the people are approachable and industrious, small shops (spazzas) spring up from shacks on the roadsides, the community help police their own problems, and I felt more than safe [View Full Entry]

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Swaziland was nothing like I expected. I had bought a brand new travel guide and read about Alpine peaks, cheese, chocolate, Heidi, and a national obsession with local hero Roger Federer. Nothing of the sort - the chocolate tastes of cardboard the cheese of plastic. Swaziland is a tiny, under-developed kingdom mostly surrounded by South Africa like a nut in a spanner, with Mozambique sharing a small border on the other side. It was held as a British colony long after we handed South Africa it's independence. It was then afforded its own independence in 1968 and is now one of [View Full Entry]

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As I set off from the tip of another continent I still harboured some ambitions of making it as far as Cairo. And who knows, even home to London from there. But Charley Boorman and Obi Wan Kenobi have stolen my thunder somewhat. Mind you, they did have The Force with them (ie. 1200cc of engine force). Whereas my 2 wheels were not going to turn themselves. But in my favour I had a mighty strong tailwind to push me along the South African coastline, along with a little help from my friends. Plenty of people were driving a similar route [View Full Entry]

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I touched down in Perth still laden with a boxed up bike which I had unsuccessfully and lacklustrely tried to offload in Hong Kong. It would be a further hour or so before I was allowed past immigration and officially entered Australian soil. Australian customs are particularly fussy about food, fauna and foreign soil (aka dirt) being brought into their country. Add to that my uncanny knack of being picked out by Customs Officers for a thorough inspection. So as usual I was taken to one side to have my bags searched. Despite having been told many stories to the contrary, [View Full Entry]

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I took the high speed catamaran from Macau to Hong Kong. It's fast, taking just 1 hour to cover 65km. I can't work out how fast that is, but it sounds dead fast. A few mates from home were flying out to Hong Kong to meet me for a week: Mike, Gareth, Vera, the Cat and Rich (who will be guest blogging later on). I knew it was going to a different class of tourism from what I had become accustomed to. These guys were on holiday and on a holiday budget, whereas I had been living on a shoestring travelbum [View Full Entry]

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CHINA & MACAU Hello me old china's. A little off-track, I crossed from Vietnam into China. The first city I reached was Kunming, a monster of a city. Like most cities in China it is expanding at an exponential rate and has an economy that is growing almost as fast as Facebook membership. The world's 5th biggest country is the most populated. Unless you can imagine what 1 billion people looks like, China's population is unimagineable. In the areas surrounding Kunming are a few sites worth seeing, including the exaggeratively named "1,000 Buddha cave" where I counted precisely 24 Buddh [View Full Entry]

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