Andra

2022. The year we turned 50. Also the year we joined the “Seven Continent Club” Our trip to Antarctica was aboard Hurtigruten’s MS Roald Amundsen . We loved the boat, our cabin, the crew and the food. As ours did, many expedition cruises to Antarctica leave from Ushuaia, Argentina, the world's southernmost city. This is a beautiful starting point where you are surrounded by picturesque mountains and a cute quiet little tourist town. We boarded Hurtigruten’s MS Roald Amundsen in the late afternoon and headed out into the Beagle Channel on our way to our crossing of The Drake Passage. The Beagle channel was beautiful. Snow capped mountains on either side. Lovely. Crossing “The Drake” takes about 2 days. The seas had 5m to 9m swells over the course of our 2 days. Yes….we were treated ... read more

We disembarked from our cruise in Singapore and opted to spend 2 nights here before travelling home. A great way to end our trip. We dropped our bags at our hotel, bought a 2 day subway pass and headed immediately to The Gardens By The Bay. We arrived around mid day and decided to do the indoor options first to escape the heat for a bit ( FYI Singapore is 137 km from the equator. It’s hot!). While there’s lots to explore in this park we started with the Cloud Forest and Garden Dome. Both are monstrous indoor greenhouses that are very cool (both figuratively and physically); they showcased vegetation from all over the world; everything from Cactuses to Orchids to Baobab trees to Venus Fly Traps. We then wandered among the enormous outdoor grounds until ... read more

Cambodia, Cambodia, Cambodia. It is definitely a country in transition. We're not sure if the term “3rd world” is used anymore but If it is Cambodia definitely qualifies. We were picked up at the port by a lovely man named Heng in a small mini-van. He had a fairly okay command of the English language as he provided us information throughout our journey but he struggled with comprehension when he was asked questions. That being said, his command of English far exceeds our command of Cambodian! Cambodia is a country that you need to embrace being a “traveller” vs. a “tourist”. We were once given definitions to these terms; a tourist is someone who visits locations looking through the eyes and expectations of their home culture while a traveller is someone who visits locations with an ... read more

Arrival in Hong Kong by boat is quite a spectacular sight. What an amazing introduction to this unbelievable city. As soon as our ship was cleared by customs at 7pm we headed out on the subway to one of our most anticipated stops. The highest bar in the world, called Ozone, located on the 118th floor of the Ritz Carleton hotel. We arrived to delicious (but pricey) cocktails. While enjoying our first drink we were given two drink tickets from guests of The Ritz Carleton who couldn’t use them. We decided to give the drink tickets a try and when Chris got to the bar the bartender took them, poured one drink and while he was making the other he gave Chris a sheet where he was asked to indicate his guest information. Chris is horrible ... read more

Konichiwa! Tokyo. Its organized chaos. That was apparent the minute we arrived at the airport. We had been told that the Japanese are extremely willing to help and, thankfully, that turned out to be true. With the help of information centres and random people we conquered the train and subway system and managed to see a reasonable chunk of Tokyo. We visited a couple of temples and shrines, a cat cafe, had a drink at New York Bar on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel (if you've seen Lost In Translation you may remember this bar), navigated the Shibuya Crossing more than once and had some memorable meals. By far our best meal was as a restaurant called Teppan Baby. We sat right at the teppen grill and watched as 3 chefs prepared meals ... read more