Having spent the best part of the last month relaxing on the sea whether sailing or diving, it was clear the fun would soon have to end I would be reinstalling myself back into society. I look forward to no longer describing myself as both jobless and homeless. I feared it would be too much of a shock to the system however to go from 0-60 mph in one fell swoop so I decided to build myself back up slowly with a hop and a skip to Singapore and Bangkok for a night each. I stayed with a friend of mine [View Full Entry]

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The journey from Queensland to Indonesia wasn't the most obvious route. Jetstar decided to cancel my original flight and reschedule so that I would arrive at the layover destination 2 hours AFTER my connecting flight would have already left! As a result I now found my self connecting via Melbourne meaning I first had to fly 2 hours in the wrong direction. I finally arrived in Denpasar on the island of Bali at 1.30am. At least that's what I thought. I jumped in a taxi only to be told by the taxi driver that although the airport is called Denpasar it [View Full Entry]

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Having celebrated my 30th only the night before, I crawled out of bed for the early morning flight to Hamilton Island, just one of many islands in WhitSundays. The cheapest accomodation on Hamilton is AUD 220 per night so being a cheap traveller I made my way to the main land and based myself at Airlie beach until I would pick up the sailing boat the next day. Being a saturday night I decided to explore and found a great fish and chip shop and then went for a beer where there was some live music. A middle aged guy stepped [View Full Entry]

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Overall I ended up spending 3 weeks in Sydney which have been great. It has all been about chilling out and making a long U-turn back to the shores of little Britain. First thing I noticed was that I could add Australian dollar notes to the list, alongside cockroaches, of the only things that would not be destroyed in the event of a nuclear bomb. In gives some perspective as to how seriously the Aussies take their outdoor life, and particularly surfing, when they can persuade the national mint to make waterproof currency which is impossible to tear. I spent the [View Full Entry]

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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 discovere [View Full Entry]

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