In the evening Claire & I sat on the balcony of the hostel & made friends with a lovely Irish couple. We went into our room & made friends with our six other room mates, 2 Korean guys, Veronica, a snorer from Ireland, Ross from Bury, (he went to the same school as Claire!), Odid from Israel & James from London. We all had such a laugh & Claire & I managed to get drunk & entertain everyone, I think we had both missed meeting people & we had such a good night. Saturday we spent the day recovering from [View Full Entry]

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Monday 14th May (1036kms) - a record number of kilometres in one day from Daly Waters to Mount Isla, crossing the Queensland border & making the time difference between us & the UK 9 hours. As you can imagine when we got to Mount Isla we were exhausted so went & got some cheese & Biscuits & wine for a nice treat. We may have overdone it a bit on the wine in the evening but I think it was needed as we were feeling a bit claustrophobic in Shack & homesick, constantly being on the road. Tuesday 15th May [View Full Entry]

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Thursday 10th May (803.3kms) - We lost 1.5 hours by driving over a line in the road, I don't think I had ever done that until entering the Northern Territory, (where speed limits increase, along with bush fires). We drove through the remaining part of Western Australia, stopping the night at Victoria River, we'd stopped for various photo opportunities during the day & when we stopped for the night after tea we lay under the stars with a glass of wine, with no light pollution we were able to see thousands of stars it was beautiful. Friday 11th May (595.9kms) [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 29th April (414kms) - We set off North & it wasn't long before it started raining, we had planned to drive to Geraldton but noticed that The Pinnacles were in the area so took a detour to see them, (a National Park which is made up of thousands of limestone pillars resembling termite mounds, some as tall as five metres, some only centimetres tall). It had been raining on & off all day & when we got to the Pinnacles it absolutely threw it down & Claire & I were completely soaked. We continued to head north & stopped [View Full Entry]

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When the plane landed in Perth it seemed to take forever to get through Immigrations & customs, when we walked through the doors I thought I'd cry but I didn't but was really happy to see Mom, Dad, Uncle John & Nikki. It was about 1am I think by the time we got through, it may have even been about 2am, we headed back to John & Nikki's in two cars & had some wine to celebrate. Mom, Claire & I stayed up till 5am I think drinking & chatting but it had to be done! John had to leave [View Full Entry]

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Sunday we got up & walked to the bus station to get the bus to the airport & got our flight to Miri, we got a bus into Miri & checked into a place listed in the Lonely Planet, it wasn't very nice but still we had air con & a TV! We went out for dinner & everywhere was closed, we managed to find a shopping mall where we grabbed some food in the supermarket & headed home to watch TV. On Monday, (after a terrible nights sleep), we went to the Visitors information Centre to find out about [View Full Entry]

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We landed in Kuching about 10.30am & by the time we had got our bags, got the bus into town & walked to the hostel it was just before midday. We had a shower & then had a sleep as spending the night in the airport never gets you a good night sleep but works out more cost efficient. We ended up sleeping till about 3.30pm, a combination of the heat & tiredness had made us sleep for a good three hours. We headed out to explore Kuching, we had a look around a couple of shopping malls, as Kuching [View Full Entry]

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The dive shop we had arranged our dives with had booked us into the Dragon Inn, which the Lonely Planet said was a cheap, basic place that was a floating village, we thought this sounded good & were fine with it. When we checked in we got chatting to an Irish guy in our dorm called Tom who warned us about the rats that patrol the premises. We removed the food from our bags, locked them with our pac safes & went out to find some food & an internet place. We stopped off at the dive shop on the [View Full Entry]

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We got collected by Uncle Tan's at 12.45pm & taken to the base in Gum Gum , about a ten minutes drive from Sepilok. We had lunch there, filled in our registration forms, read up about our stay in the jungle & got the chance to go to the supermarket to get some snacks & much needed insect repellant. We recognised a guy there who also came & said he recognised us, it turns out we were room mates with in Cheng-Du in China, (Joel), its a small world. We left in two minibuses, (about 20 of us), at about 2.30pm [View Full Entry]

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We got a public bus from the bus stop a couple of streets away from the hostel in KK to the north bus terminal & got a bigger bus from there at 9.30am to Sepilok, arriving at Sepilok Junction at 3.30pm. We got a minibus down the road to where we were staying, Sepilok Jungle Resort. It was set in the middle of the jungle in a beautiful location, surrounded by endless amounts of trees & some lakes, although there wasn't anything to see or do there apart from the Orangutan Sanctuary. We had dinner, a shower & an early [View Full Entry]

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