After a few days travelling we ended up in Gili air island, close to Lombok, Indonesia. Here we settled for a couple of nights, and sampled some of the fine cuisine. We heard of a liveaboard boat that heads east from Lombok, for 3 nights, catching some nice sights along on the way, but most importantly Komodo and Rinca islands, home to the legendary Komodo Dragon. A local travel agent showed us a brochure for the boat which featured a "Ficture of the boat" and a ficture of the "daragoon". We were hoping to get a couple of days diving in [View Full Entry]

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Semporna is a smelly dirty town on the east coast of Borneo with absolutely nothing to offer. In fact many embassies advise against traveling to the region, probably because it's so smelly. So why did we come?.. We came on the recommendation of an expat yank we met in the Philippines who told us of an island 40mins east of here that has some very good diving. As he had been living, traveling and diving Asia for some years we took his word for it and came. We spent a few days diving/snorkeling the aforementioned island, Sipidan and some other islands [View Full Entry]

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Another Filipino city didn't appeal to us, so upon arrival at Cebu we headed straight to the pier and caught the Supercat to Ormoc. Security on the Supercat was Supertight, with the checks you'd expect at an airport (Passport, Metal detector, bag scan, body frisk) followed by sniffer dog inspection, palm swabbing and photograph. The absence of retina scan and finger printing made the whole thing seem a bit lapse. A few more security checkpoints later and we were on the Ferry. After we realised all the paranoia was due to a bomb attack on a similar [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superferry_ [View Full Entry]

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Palawan is a sparsely inhabited island in the SW Philippines. It's waters and much of the island are protected so it's home to some unique wildlife. This is why we came. We flew into the capital, Peurto Princesa, and after getting some local advice we boarded a bus north to a town called Roxas (pronounced Rohas). The road was paved and the journey was surprisingly pleasant except for the fish soup pouring down on top of us from the roof cargo when the bus took a sharp bend. Upon arrival at Roxas we got on a boat for an island called [View Full Entry]

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Manila welcomed us with a 20 min wait on the tarmac followed by an immigration hall full of people. Even Filipinos have to fill in an arrival card here. Trust nobody.. where have I heard that before. We joined the queue with ~80 people in front of us. The airport felt like it hadn't been cleaned since the 70s, making me glad I had checked us into the Four Seasons Manila. Eventually we got through immigration, collected our bags and were on our way to our hotel, through the Manila slums. There was something about the outside of the four seasons [View Full Entry]

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I must admit, any preconceptions I had of military personnel been dumb idiots were wrong. Our in flight entertainment for the 12 hour flight from London to Hong Kong was a proud member of her majesties armed forces.Our new soldier friend entertained us with interesting stories such as how rivalary between different sections of the army can often lead to fistups. The example he gave was when he met a member of the RAF in a local pub. Each slagged off the others section and ended up in full blown brawl with broken bottles etc. Reminded me of primary school fights [View Full Entry]

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