Hi everybody! Warren at the healm once again. You may remember me from such blogs as 1000 Things To Do with Stuff and Where Did I Leave My Dong? After I had parted from the missus, we made our way from Hoi An and entered Laos via Hue and across the border at Lao Bao. from there it was to Savanakhet on the Thai border. And just in the nick of time as it had pretty much rained for 48 hours straight and the flood waters of Central Vietnam were rising. I only heard about the crazy typhoon that hit Central [View Full Entry]

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A Hoi An Wedding Ceremony Seeing as we were having a ‘home-made’ wedding with ingredients from Scotland, Ireland, Vietnam and Pakistan thrown in, we thought we would let you know what was happening on the day. Since we did not have a priest or registrar marrying us, the beach ceremony in the afternoon gave our friends and family a chance to be involved - we like to think that our family and friends were the ones marrying us! Here is how the days progressed... The Sequence of Events Wednesday Morning *After a lovel [View Full Entry]

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After 7 months of being in Warren's pocket, it was time to be a brave girl and finally head out to do my own thing, and what better than meeting my favourite sister Huma in Beijing?! The last time I was in Beijing was 10 years ago and I was really looking forward to experiencing all the recent changes and seeing the city prepare to wow the world at the 2008 Olympics. On arrival at Beijing airport, the first excitement was seeing a young chap caught by the police for shoplifting a bottle of CocaCola - a true post-communist statement. Arriving [View Full Entry]

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Hi again everybody. Sofie and I are about to go our separate ways. She has a visa for the People's Republic of China and I for Vietnam. We've tried to reconcile ourselves to travelling separately on our journey but since we'll meet again in Saigon in a month or so it's really not so long at all. So to Bangkok. Every time I visit the city I am more and more suprprised. Sure it's a big noisy Asian Megacity but it has it's charms. We spent a fair bit of time being choked by traffic fumes but taking the river ferries [View Full Entry]

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Tribal Tour (Note: There are two pages of photographs so check out page two or even better use the slide-show tool) From Puri we embarked on a six day Tribal Tour booked through the excellent Adventure Odyssey (thanks to Chinya, Deepak and Jaisan!!) and had a fantastic insight into the adivasi cultures of West and South Orissa where over seventy indigenous peoples are recognised - each with different language, clothing, living arrangements and customs. The highlight of the trip was Day Three when we met the Bonda tribe on their way to market. The Bonda today number ju [View Full Entry]

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Bhubaneswar We are near the end of our Indian Subcontinent travel odyssey and decided to spend some time in lovely Orissa as it had been recommended by several people and was on the way to Calcutta anyway. We arrived in Bhubaneswar off the train from Vijayawada and Hampi and were pretty tired. We had a very nice room in Rohilla Tourist Home and spent a couple of days wandering around the ancient Hindu temples of the Orissan State capital, looking in the crowded markets and staying out of the intense sun. The Orissa State Museum though a little dusty was a [View Full Entry]

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After a day spent in Bangalore (we saw 'Memoirs of a Geisha' at a really flashy cinema and hung out in a lovely colourful park) we got on the Hampi express and met up with some really nice people at the train station in Bangalore all on their way to Hampi. We arrived into Hospet and rickshawed to the river bank in Hampi to take our boat to the Heart of Darkness on North side of the river. Straight away I think everybody is struck by the landscape. It's kind of primal like the Himalayas. You never tire of looking at [View Full Entry]

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We didn't spend too long in Tamil Nadu although we'd originally intended spending 3 weeks temple-hopping our way from Madurai and Ramaswaram up to Trichy, Mamallapuram and Tirupati (in Andhra Pradesh). It was just too hot and after seeing th epretty representative Meenakshi Temple in Madurai with it's buzz and hubbub we decided to literally head for the hills - the Nilgiri Hills and the hill station of Kodaikanal which we really loved. Kodaikanal has a lovely climate and reminded me of what it feels like to be out on an Autumn day in Ireland. The hills are pretty untouched and [View Full Entry]

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Arriving into Kochin Overnight from Bombay by train to Kochin with a lovely young Bombayite couple, Amit and Renu, we arrived into the Keralan state refreshed and covered in Mehndi patterns (henna). Fort Kochin is on an island and is best accessed by a local ferry - a great way to arrive anywhere. We spent a few days hanging around at the beach and watching the local fishermen coming in with some impressive catches. The Chinese fishing nets here are beautiful at sunset but are now a dying tradition. Most fishermen were only 'catching tourists' by asking a few rupees or [View Full Entry]

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After leaving Bhuj we made our way to the Southern Gujurati Saurasthra region in part to climb the 10,000 steps of the Jain pilgrimage route at Girnar Hill (near Junugadh). We hoped that our Nepali trekking experience would carry us through but that trial was fading from muscle memory. Apart from Junugadh we also paid a visit to the last place in the world where the Asian lion is still untamed and extant. Did we see one? Did we come across this king of the animal kingdom? Did we see it bounding towards our broken down jeep with terrifying speed and [View Full Entry]

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