We have left it ages to update our blog this time - really bad - it was just a ploy to keep people wanting more, but strangely it hasn’t worked! Ha ha ha. No - that’s not true - we are just lazy. To pick up where we left off anyway, we were picked up from our accommodation in Phnom Pehn at 7.30am to get the bus to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) and made our way to the border. The bus was amazingly spacious and equipped with air-conditioning - our new best friend. The border crossing [View Full Entry]

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On the morning we left Bangkok to go to Cambodia, we were picked up by the bus at 7am and had a fairly uneventful drive to the Thailand-Cambodia border. Once at the border, we all handed over our passports to get our Cambodian visas. We had paid for the bus to take us to Siem Reap in Cambodia, but once across the border we were all told that we would have to wait for 2-3 hours for a bus to arrive and then it would be a 6 hour drive to Siem Reap. This was at odds with what we had [View Full Entry]

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Once we arrived back in Kathmandu, the chaos hit us the minute we stepped off the bus. Instantly we were surrounded by sellers and taxi drivers shouting at us to pick them. It was the strangest thing - we had kind of been in a cocoon for the previous few days and it took us a few minutes to process it all and get our groove back. Thankfully we had had the foresight to book somewhere reasonably nice for the two nights we had in Kathmandu. Bliss. The first thing we had to do was drop all our laundry to be [View Full Entry]

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After our trek anyway, we headed off dwon to Chitwan Wildlife Reserve. This is just on the Indian border and so was about a 7 hour bus ride. We figured we were pretty used to mammoth bus journeys at this stage, but when we got down to where the bus was leaving from, the bus was pretty much full and we had to practically sit on top of the driver for the first 3 hours. That's quite literally - I was sittting on a bench like thing right behind him with my knees pulled up to my ears and another girls [View Full Entry]

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So - as we said in our previous entry, we decided to do a trek in the Annapurna region. Kathmandu is all about the trekking - and we were almost kind of caught up in the excitement of it all. Thankfully we booked a fairly short trek in the scheme of things. Ours was 5 days long - of trekking every day - for between 5 and 7 hours a day. There is a specific circuit around the Annapurnas which takes something like 21 days - of torture that is! We began the trip anyway by taking a bus from Kathmandu [View Full Entry]

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We're finally updating our blog again after being out of touch there for a few days! We were basically in rural Tibet and conditions were fairly primitive in some places. The last place we left on the blog was Shigatse. The morning we left Shigatse, we drove for about 4 hours and came to a town called Sakya. A lot of these towns are built around the monastery and very little else so there is not a huge amount to do other than that. Once we arrived here, we had some lunch (in a pretty filthy restaurant it has to be [View Full Entry]

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This morning we head off in a convoy of 4x4's into rural Tibet. Myself, Joe and Craig are in one and our driver Phubu, who has pigeon English at best and yet nods at anything you say as if he understands it perfectly, has a serious penchant for Tibetan disco music...............you could almost call it Tibetan disco meets German punk rock I think................he has a cassette (Tibetan Disco Greatest Hits?) playing on a loop. Enough said...!!! W're driving to a place called Tsetang, which is only a couple of hours from Lhasa. The comfort of the 4x4 (the drivers music taste [View Full Entry]

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The day after we arrive in Lhasa, we have a Tibetan language class in the morning.We're given a sheet of paper with loads of useful phrases and we're really trying to use them.Some people appreciate it but anyone who has any English just wants to use their English words! After a walk around the city we have a Tibetan cookery class where we learn how to make momos, a traditional Tibetan dumpling type dish. It's actually pretty delicious, all the more for having been made by ourselves!Well in fairness, we actually just shaped them - everything else was done by the [View Full Entry]

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This morning we left our hotel at 5am to catch our flight to Lhasa.Joe and I have exactly the same liquids in our hand luggage as we had leaving Dublin and leaving Heathrow - so we don't anticipate any problems.It's a 2 hour domestic flight with Air China.However they won't let us bring our all important mosquito repellant through!!We end up checking in another bag though so it's not a problem.Mam had given us a bottle of holy water as well to bring with us and when the security man held it up wondering what it was, my heart sank.Once I [View Full Entry]

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This morning we all met in the lobby of the hotel at 6am to head off on the mammoth drive into rural China. We're heading to an area that is considered by some to be Eastern Tibet.Because we are in the Sichuan Province, there is quite a lot of earthquake damage visible from the earthquake in May - mostly landslides and huge cracks in the road.As usual the driving is absolutely manic.It's obvious that the rules are there are no rules.Overtaking on a bend is the norm.We are in the bus for 12 hours and the bus driver is beeping constantly.It's [View Full Entry]

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