After a three day stop over in Bangkok where we shopped till we dropped and pampered ourselves in a five star hotel, it was back to Melbourne. It was a relief to finally get home after such a long time away. We missed the simple things like a fridge or running water and also modern conveniences like telephones and creature comforts like a nice bed. A month on now and when we reflect we think of so many different things that we saw and experienced. The mugging has become a bit of a joke and we can laugh about it now. [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Cairo at around 2.00am in the morning. We met some other aussie travellers and took a ride in a clapped out old volvo to our hostel called 'the let me in hostel'. We were immediately surprised by the Egyptian hospitality when the guy who checked us into the hostel made us a cup of tea at 2.30 in the morning. The first thing we noticed about Egypt was the heat. Even though we had been enjoying the European summer, nothing prepared us for the heat in Cairo. It was absolutely boiling. We spent the first day (tentatively) exploring [View Full Entry]

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It was actually raining when we arrived from Spain which was really strange as we thought we were going to cook. We arrived in Barcelona with about 12 days to see as much as we could before we flew out to Egypt. We decided to spend a few days in Barcelona where we shopped and shopped because it was so fantastic and sampled the local fare including Paella and Sangria. We then took yet another 8 hour trip north to San Sebastian in the Basque region. Whilst in San Sebastian we ran into a million other aussie backpackers who seem all [View Full Entry]

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Bet you thought we had dropped off the face of the earth...Is anyone actually reading this thing anymore? As we sit in our air conditioned room in our hostel in Barcelona, it's easy to look back on Italy and see the things we didn't enjoy - massive crowds of tourists, mopeds nearly taking our life in a crowded market, a lady on the bus getting her purse snatched - but there were plenty of great sites too, Pompeii being undoubtedly the highlight. On the 24th August 79AD the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupted and spewed ash all over Pompeii. After many years [View Full Entry]

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Rome deserves its own entry because it's a fantastic city with many a ruin to explore. You virtually cannot move in Rome without tripping over a ruin. We flew from London to Rome which took longer than expected because our flight was delayed at Heathrow (not suprising to anyone that has flown from Heathrow recently). The first thing we noticed about Rome and Italy was the intense heat. London was averaging about 19-20 degrees each day but Rome was about 35 degrees on the day we arrived. We spent the four days in Rome visiting all of the major sites including [View Full Entry]

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After an eleven hour flight we arrived in London, England on the 19th of July. It was great to arrive in an English speaking country and order something from a menu that we could actually read and understand. We spent the night in a hostel in Bayswater (a lovely suburb in London near Hyde Park). First impressions were everything was so orderly and clean, but the women seemed extremely overdressed for a Wednesday afternoon! Next it was on to Manchester where we hired a car just out of central London to avoid the traffic and drove to Kev and Shannon's house [View Full Entry]

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Following BA we ventured south into Patagonia. First stop after another marathon bus ride (27 hours) was Bariloche to hit the slopes of Cerro Catedral, the southern hemisphere´s largest ski center. Chris was keen to re ignite his passion for the snowboard while Kirsty wanted to try skiing. Bariloche itself was a great little town, surrounded by snowcapped mountains and with some of the best chocolate shops we have ever seen. The hostel also had amazing views... but that´s beside the point - we were here to ski! A girl in our hostel was a ski instructor so she offered her [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Buenos Aires on a friday night and by the Saturday night we were sitting on a love seat in a television show featuring in a game show called ´For Love or for Money´. Basically, the production company was filming the show for a promo to sell to other companies and they needed gringos who could speak english to film a segment. It was really strange but we felt famous for a night. We had our hair and make-up done and the best bit was that we were paid $500 argentine pesos! We were hooked up to microphones (which [View Full Entry]

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With Bolivia behind us it was time for some decadence - Argentinian style! Of course this means quality wine, thicker-than-your-thigh steaks and five star class buses - hardly ´roughing it´. Our first stop in Argentina was Salta , but it took an interesting couple of bus rides to get there... Getting to the Bolivian/Argentinian border meant a 4 am bus ride along a dirt road, on a bus that would have looked more suited to the set of a Mad Max movie than to ferrying passengers. But as always we arrived in one piece, at the freezing border town of Villazon [View Full Entry]

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Unfortunatley, this entry only has photos as the whole blog site crashed and we lost our written entry. Sorry! [View Full Entry]

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