So having spent a week with my cousins in Sydney (I'll write about Sydney in another blog), I decided I would take a flight to Melbourne - frequently voted the 2nd best city in the world to live from a quality of life perspective and it's easy to see why when it has churned out some of life's greats such as Mrs. Mangel, Harold Bishop and Helen Daniels. Don't pretend you don't know what/who I'm talking about. I know most of you would also have been glued to the television at 5:35 each evening to find out the latest gossip from [View Full Entry]

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Aotearoa meaning Island of the Long White Cloud, as New Zealand is known in Maori, was always going to be memorable. It would be the first time I would see Sheena in 5 weeks, Mel & Roly were getting married, we would sky dive, bungy jump and base jump our way around this most beautiful country. We started in Christchurch. It started well picking up the rental car from a company called Jucy and filling in the paper work with Lucy. Yes, within seconds of arriving in NZ I had met Jucy Lucy. That evening I met up with two of [View Full Entry]

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Hong Kong was carnage. There is no other way to describe the 5 days I spent there. 21 days of not drinking whilst trekking in Nepal combined with a 10hr delay in Delhi were not the ideal preparation for a weekend at the HK 7s rugby tournament. Arriving at central station, I put on my best Chinese accent and asked the taxi driver to head for the glamorous sounding Hollywood road. It started well, as James my host for the week showed me to a private room with a double bed and a bathroom with running water opposite....sheer luxury compared to [View Full Entry]

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Days 7-9 (The Hard Graft) Having acclimitised in Namche Bazaar for the past 24 hours, it was good to get going again despite the route taking us up a steep incline at 7 o'clock in the morning. We were rewarded after about 2 hours with absolutely breathtaking views of Lhotse, the snow capped ridge of Nuptse and our first glimpse of Everest in the distance. Despite already being close to the treeline in altitude, and the mountains we were viewing being in the distance, it was still possible to appreciate the sheer size of Chomolungma (as Everest is named by Sherpas). [View Full Entry]

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Day 1 - Day 2 After a tearful goodbye with Sheena at Heathrow and loaded with the bags of creme eggs I was given just prior to going through the gate (I am discovering that true love comes in the shape of little eggs!), my himilayan adventure was about to start. I bought everything I had realised I had forgotten to pack on the security side of the airport (except all the trip details including the meeting point in Kathmandu with the tour company) and boarded the plane. After an 8hr layover sleeping across seats in Delhi international, being accosted by [View Full Entry]

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The islands of the Galapagos, derive their name from the Saddle-Backed tortoise (Galapagos means saddle in Spanish) and are situated 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The Galapagos are vastly more interesting with the benefit of some prior reading about their origins, familiarising oneself with some of the wildlife and also about Darwin himself. Although presented often in documentaries as a keen (self-taught) naturalist, which he was, Darwin´s methods of experiments were often far from acceptable in today´s standards. For example, he used to ride giant tortoises like horses and discovered the idea that marine iguanas had evolved a defense [View Full Entry]

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We flew to Lima on valentine´s night. One way to measure how good a time you've had in Lima is to count the number of credit cards and bags that are missing at the end. Not known for it's safety (most hotels send a designated driver to the airport to pick guests up directly) - ours didn't of course - we locked our taxi doors and headed to our gated hostal. We only had a few hours to see Lima the next day before flying to the Peru-Ecuador border town of Tumbes. We did manage however to take some pictures of [View Full Entry]

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Due to a whistle stop tour to Machu Picchu we managed to squeeze in time for a 3 day trekking trip through the Colca Canyon - about a 5 hour drive from the old Spanish colonial town of Arequipa in Southern Peru. Arequipa has a picturesque main square with white moorish style columns and arches lining the edges. We arranged our trekking trip, bought some new hip and trendy flip flops (mine had broken) and guaranteed ourselves another 5:30am pick up. That night, we opted for a small pizzeria on the other side of town. Within 5 minutes the girl sitting [View Full Entry]

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Sheena and I wouldn't have made good Incas. First we opted for the bus rather than face climbing the 1000m at 5am from the town of Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu. Then, huffing and puffing, we crawled our way up Huayna Picchu, the mountain standing behind Machu Picchu in the classic postcard shot. We got the first bus to try and snatch a view of Machu Picchu before sunrise and before the hoards of tourists would arrive around 10am on the train from Cusco. It was worth the effort. Once we had signed ourselves in at the entrance gate we turned [View Full Entry]

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Off to Peru we were. A short 6hr bus ride around Lake Titicaca, past Puno and onwards to Cusco - Peru´s oldest city and the base from which to visit Machu Picchu. A simple journey until our bus driver decided to drive past a customs police blockade at 60miles an tour. Whistles, sirens, the works as the police caught up with us. The driver eventually pulled over and the luggage holds were opened for inspection. Normally that would be fine but the Peruvian police are not reknowned for being the most trustworthy themselves so Sheena watched the bags inside the bus [View Full Entry]

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