I am sitting in Margao train station in Goa about to embark on my journey home after 550 days of seeing the world - a 12 hour sleeper train to Mumbai arriving at 6 in the morning, my flight leaves at 1pm, takes 11 hours (I think) and then I'll probably end up waiting 5 hours or so at Heathrow so as to get an overnight bus to Glasgow that arrives at a sensible time rather than at 3am. Although Thurs night is student night, so maybe I'll head straight to the Garage or Fury Murrays. Anyway, all good things come [View Full Entry]

---

---

One of the things that travelling teaches you is that your expectations mean nothing, and so it was with the south of Thailand, where my notions of what it would be like turned out to be 10 years out of date. My mental image of beaches full of hale and hearty travellers all sharing tales of travels around the globe proved to be well misfounded. Thailand, even the supposedly 'backpacker' areas, is packed full of people from northern Europe on 2 week holidays. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, except that they all seem a bit zombified (yes, [View Full Entry]

---

---

Malaysia hadn't been in my plans at all, but with it being 9 degrees and raining in Hanoi, and 0 degrees in the area that I'd planned to go trekking in the north of Vietnam, it quickly became a part of them after I went into the Air Asia office to find out where I could fly to from Hanoi. It meant I can head up overland through Thailand to catch my next flight in a month's time to India. I liked Kuala Lumpur, although I only spent a couple of days there, due to the budget accomodation not being that [View Full Entry]

---

---

I travelled to Saigon (also known as Ho Chi Minh City) from Pnom Penh to meet up with Kiran who had come all the way from sunny Glasgow to join me on my travels for a couple of weeks. As he only had a bit less than two weeks to travel from Saigon to Hanoi, we were on a schedule (something I'm not used to anymore!) So day 1 was spent exploring Saigon, where we went to the market and the War Remnants museum, which displays some very disturbing evidence of the war with America. The next day we went on [View Full Entry]

---

---

The quick version of what I did in Cambodia, because writing it up has been holding up my blog updates for a month now!! I flew to Siem Reap from Pakse on Christmas Eve, employed a moto driver to take me to the temples for the next 3 days, and then went to Angkor Wat for Christmas morning sunrise. Me and a whole lot of other people, all stumbling about in the dark trying to get the most photogenic position. The temples of Angkor are truly amazing, the thing that I didn't really grasp before I went was how widespread and [View Full Entry]

---

---

I spent a month in Laos in total, and it still wasn't enough to take everything in. After doing the trek mentioned in the previous blog, I headed for an even smaller town, Muang Sing, which was according to Lonely Planet, the eco trekking centre of Laos and one of the highlights of South East Asia. They must have been having an off day, there was absolutely nothing to do and no one knew of anything to do, apart from going to look at the Chinese border 10km away. The 2 hour journey up through the hills was spectacular, although I [View Full Entry]

---

---

Part 2 of the previous journal - Why should it just be the tourists who get to take pictures? These were taken by various village kids of Ban Nam Lai using my camera. (The numbers don't mean anything, just you have to give the photo a title to be able to upload it) [View Full Entry]

---

---

I spent a couple of days trekking in northern Laos from Luang Nam Tha to a hill tribe village, Ban Nam Lai, where we spent the night. There were no roads at all to the village, so not even a motorbike there, and other than the odd Man Utd item, life there seemed to our European eyes to be unchanged from what it must have been like hundreds of years ago (although the villagers may well feel differently). The hill tribe was Akha, and fortunately for us we arrived on night 1 of a 3 day wedding celebration, which we were [View Full Entry]

---

---

I've spent the last few days in the north of Thailand, going on treks for 3 days from Chiang Mai and for 2 days near Chiang Rai. I'd hoped to do a bit more trekking and a bit less trailing round agencies looking for treks, but it seems to be pretty difficult to get more than a 3 day trek, and most of those involve driving round in a 4x4, elephant riding, rafting etc, leaving you to do about 2 hours walking somewhere inbetween. But the treks I've been on did get me out into the forest and staying in 3 [View Full Entry]

---

---

Hve only been in Thailand a few days now - spent 4 days in Bangkok, saw a few of the main sights, the Grand Palace and Reclining Buddha are amazing. I'm now in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand after an overnight train journey (a proper sleeper service where someone comes round and makes your bed up for you, it was brilliant, after a year of many overnight journeys, I've not been able to lie out before!) The big dilemma now is whether to go on a three day trek or stay in Chiang Mai in the hope that someone [View Full Entry]

---

---