As travellers, it always seems like a good idea to go back to places where you had a good experience. For the second time in 6 months we have been very disappointed by places we have revisited. We should have known things would not go smoothly when stupid Cebu Pacific wouldn’t allow us to book flights online, it’s website has an inability to accept foreign bank issued credit cards. When we finally managed to book our flights to Cebu, a week before leaving we had the flight times first changed (both going and returning) then the return flight was cancelled and then the return flight was re-instated only 3 days later than originally scheduled! So arriving into Cebu went a little more smoothly and surprisingly the hotel we had booked in Cebu city had kept our ... read more

As mentioned in our last blog, after the scamming and thieving in Cambodia we decided to head to Koh Chang in Thailand a few days earlier than we originally planned. We booked our transport through the hotel we were staying at as they offered a free drop-off to the bus station for our 7:30am bus. We weren’t looking forward to the journey as last year when we did it the road was still being constructed and we had to use a series of ferries to cross the 4 rivers along the way which meant getting on and off the bus in the heat and hanging around. But a year had passed we kept telling ourselves, the bridges and road should be finished by now...but this was not the case... The journey had improved in as much ... read more

We expected that the bus journey to Lemut (the port near Pangkor) would take much longer than the 6 hours we had been told, so we correctly engorged ourselves on an unhealthy Mc breakfast which we knew would keep our energy levels going for some time. The only problem was that we had a huge cup of coffee and coffee makes us wee like crazy...so we spent most of the journey with crossed legs hoping for a toilet stop! The journey turned out to be 9 hours long with a surprise stop in Kuala Lumpur. Lemut was our transit point onto a modern catamaran ferry which speedily transported us to the island of Pangkor, where, to Donna's delight an army of pink Barbie style taxis were waiting to whisk us away to whatever destination we chose ... read more

We booked our transport out of Ubud, relieved we were leaving and hopefully looking forward to some nice weather at the beach for Christmas. We were more prepared this time around for the journey to be a hassle but it actually wasn't as bad as we expected. We arrived in plenty of time for the ferry and even had time to have a banana jaffle for breakfast. For those not acquainted with jaffles, they are simply toasties...the Indonesians though take toasties to a whole new level putting bananas, pineapple, egg and various other things in them. Banana jaffles, in our opinion, are definitely the best followed closely by ham and cheese! Anyhow, we were only a little worried arriving onto Gili Trawangan on 20th December with no accommodation booked after our experience of the hotel owners ... read more

We were promised an air con minibus to pick us up at 8am for our long journey to Gunung (Mount) Bromo. What did we get? A rickety old minibus with an exceedingly grumpy, madman, chain smoking driver and air con which was warm and as strong as a baby's sigh! What made it worse was that whenever the driver wanted a fag (which seemed to be every 10 minutes), he rolled down his window thereby cancelling the effect of the very weak air con. Thanks to the crazy weaving in and out of traffic and high speed driving over speed bumps we arrived into Solo desperately needing a wee...good job we had to stop to collect other people for the rest of the journey to Bromo. In addition to ourselves, we were sharing a van with ... read more