Hiya :) First week in cusco has been pretty eventful... we had a welcoming ceremony when we first arrived at Huatata which involved speeches and flowers and dancing with the locals for hours. Most of them speak spanish as well as quetchua so i'm getting quite a lot of practice in... The kids are pretty excited to see a whole load of gringos (tourists) who are willing to play with them, so we've been plñaying a lot of perro perro gato (duck duck goose except it's dog dog cat. and for some reason, the cat chases the dog...) we've tried to [View Full Entry]

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Wow. I seem to have a LOT to write for Oz... After the P party, it was time to leave Fraser and its lovely beaches... Not to worry though, because we were on our way to the famous 'Farmstay', which Nick had been waxing lyrical about for the whole trip. We were informed that they had the most attractive bartenders in the southern hemisphere, and we would be treated to a 'bush dance' and tour around the farm, which sounded like a nice break from all the late nights... Meanwhile, we had a quick stop at Noosa, where we moseyed around [View Full Entry]

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Well, we spent most of the day in the pool on Long Island, our time pretty even spread between ordering exotic-looking drinks at the underwater bar, and playing water-volleyball. We enlisted the help of several Essex lads to boost the game of the Europe team (we were playing Europe vs the rest of the world...) and, as Long Island marked the end of the tour for some of our number, we invited the guys - Daz, Gaz and Adz (:D) - for 'goodbye' drinks and inpromtu karaoke. They seemed utterly terrified by this, but were eventually press-ganged into joining us... We [View Full Entry]

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The 14th of Feb marks the start of my Contiki trip, during which I will be travelling down the East coast of Australia, starting at Cairns and working all the way down to Sydney... We met at 7 in the morning at the Cairns Colonial Club, where a little room had been put aside for all those joining the tour. Everyone sat bleary-eyed as the tour guide, Nick, introduced himself. This early morning set a precedent for the next two weeks, during which time we were up and leaving by 8 every morning :( Once everyone had arrived - about 20 [View Full Entry]

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On our Jetstar flight out from Singapore, we were shocked and appalled to discover that there were no TVs on the plane. And that we had a transfer at 5 in the morning... The security once we arrived in Australia was amazing - on our connecting flight from Darwin, we were inspected by sniffer dogs (and the woman in front of us was taken aside after the dog had found her handbag very interesting...), and once we got to Cairns, Alex suffered a pretty aggressive interrogation from a woman at passport control who was convinced that Alex was trying to get [View Full Entry]

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Firstly SORRY :) but there really hasn't been time or internet for a huge portion of the past month... There's a lot to catch up on so I'm going to split it into two entries :) We did make it to Singapore, even though our hostel assured us that there would be no buses travelling on New Year's eve, and we even managed to check in to the hostel on time. Sleepy Sam's was very cute - sinlge sex dorms with free internet (which unfortunately didn't work on hotmail and crashed every five minutes...) and breakfast included. We turned up there [View Full Entry]

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For the past week or two we've been in Malaysia, battling against the daily rain and stuffing ourselves with huge amounts of food. The cuisine here is so varied because Malaysians on the whole are split into three groups - Chinese-Malay, Malay-Malay and Indian-Malay, so food from all three is readily available from pretty much anywhere. We've enjoyed the fun of a Dim Sum restaurant, where we picked the dishes we wanted from a trolley of treats and it was cut up with scissors before we tried to use the chopsticks on it. We've had naan breads and 'roti canai' with [View Full Entry]

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We've been pretty busy over the past few days - trying to see as much of Thailand as possible before we move on to Malaysia... We're on Day 12, and whilst in Chiang Mai, we decided to do a temple tour - following the advice of our trusty Lonely Planet, we set off on a three hour whirlwind tour of the most impressive Wats (temples). Along the way we took many photos, tried out 'Monk Chat', where we had a lovely little conversation about global warming and the British Empire with a few monks, and attemted to eat some wax in [View Full Entry]

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I think I shall skip any apologies for not really keeping this up to date. It's quicker that way... Haven't written for some time, so there's a lot to catch up on - I'll just outline a few things we've done... When we arrived in Phuket on New Year's eve, we were picked up from the airport by the hotel minibus and taken to the Pearl Hotel, where we met Mr Somsak - the single most helpful and lovely man on the planet - and he invited us to the sister hotel of the Pearl, the Indigo Pearl on the coast, [View Full Entry]

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Our first day in Thailand and, having successfully found Bangkok, we were pretty pleased with ourselves (to be fair, the plane did the bulk of the work...) Shuttlebus, minibus and taxi later we had found our way to Khao San road - lined with market stalls selling tshirts, food and things that made squeaky noises... Despite the chaos, we found the Sawasdee Bunglamphoo Inn relatively easily (after ducking through a few tshirt stalls and knocking things over with our HUGE rucksacks!) and debated whether 7 was too early to go to bed. Eventually we decided it was unacceptable and went to [View Full Entry]

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