After a surprisingly sound night's sleep in our swags we woke up to the early morning sun around 6.30am. It sounds strange but waking up to the sunrise feels very natural and peaceful, much less abrasive than an alarm clock in a darkened room. Maybe I'll be sleeping with the curtains open when we get home! For breakfast we started the fire up again and toasted some bread while a kettle warmed in the embers. There were two choices for a toilet. We could either use the drop dunny attached to the farm which was basically a hole in the floor surrounded by four walls or go in the bush. The previous night I had opted for the drop dunny but in the morning light I spotted a large huntsman spider that was watching me from ... read more

The Indian Pacific pulled into Adelaide around 3pm and we were due to leave on our tour around Kangaroo Island the following day so after a quick look around town taking in some of the sights (mostly churches and statues!) we got an early night. We were picked up horribly early in a minivan by our guide Kate and drove south to Middleton Beach on the mainland for a surf lesson. Rather foolishly we had forgotten that this was part of the tour and had left our swimming gear at the bottom of our stuffed backpacks. As we have five whole days of surf lessons booked for January, as well as the fact that it was a very chilly morning, we decided to pass up on the lesson and took a walk along the pretty beach ... read more

That's it, we've left Sydney! Well, not quite. But nearly. We have quit our jobs after three months of hard toil, left our tiny little apartment and packed our bags for the outback, beaches, spiders and snakes, big rocks, fine sand and general awesomeness of Australia outside of Sydney. But we only got as far as the YHA hostel next to Central Station. Rats. Last Friday both Amy and I left our jobs and went for a big night out with various friends from both workplaces in Scruffs Murphy's bar and woke up on Saturday with fairly ferocious hangovers. Luckily we had the perfect hangover cure planned - going to the beach with Andy, Kayte, Georgie and Charlie. We caught the ferry over to Manly in gorgeous sunshine and met up with everybody before heading to ... read more

Well, its been a while since I last wrote a blog but we've been rather busy! On the Monday of our second week in Sydney I went to work in a warehouse, lifting, sorting and unpacking boxes of clothes for an Australian mail order company while Amy sorted out various potential waitressing jobs for her and some clothes for said waitressing. For the first few hours I really liked the warehouse job. It was nice to have something physical to do after years of getting fat at a desk but towards the end of the day I was utterly exhausted and my muscles were burning after 8 hours of carrying heavy boxes and my poor soft little banker hands were red raw. I was quietly relieved to have an interview at a call centre on Tuesday. ... read more

We arrived back in Hanoi on the 7th August after a relatively uneventful final journey on the sleeper bus and checked back into Classic 1 Hotel. That day was spent catching up on some sleep and just chilling out in the hotel before we headed out in the evening for a few beers. Via the wonders of facebook we had found out that one of our friends from home was going to be in Hanoi that night. We met Emma a few years ago at the Download heavy metal festival and had met up at the event every year since then but had never actually seen each other outside of it so to meet up in Hanoi seemed a little bizarre but very cool. We met in the Hanoi Backpackers Hostel and had a few beers ... read more