Oh yeah. I always thought a nice cup of tea is quintessentially British. The Argentinians, however, have their own opinions on this, and it was Edwardo, a native of said country, that introduced us to Mate. It is very different experience indeed, no sitting around a beautifully laid table drinking the finest Ceylon from china cups. The first big difference, is no matter how many of you there are there is only one cup. This cup is filled to the brim, expertly, with your tea of choice. It can be herbal or scented with citrus peal, we drank a straight up green tea. You then insert a curved ornate metal pipe with a filter at the bottom to stop you sucking up the leaves. Then from his Thermos the Mate Master fills one side of the ... read more

An interesting question, and one that was posed to us by some graffitti at the top of a catholic monument in Santiago. Yes, we have arrived in South America, to be precise we are in Santiago, capital of Chile. Talking to other travellers, Santiago wasn´t getting a particularly good write up, but we liked the place. I think the main reason for that was we arrived from over 3 months in Australia, which for all it´s natural beauty, doesn´t have a huge amount of architectural history. There we were in a city and suddenly buildings were old again, I mean really old, older than 1960. There were European style cobbled streets, statues commemorating the founding of the city in circa 1550 and mountains, lots of mountains. Santiago sits in a bowl, surrounded by the snow peaked ... read more

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday Queen Elizabeth, happy birthday to you. This is not the sort of love for the monarchy that I normally show, but seeing as she honours Australia with a public holiday for her official birthday I am prepared to sing her that little ditty. She should do the same in the UK, it would do heaps for her popularity. So to mark this occasion properly we took the opportunity of a long weekend to check out a bit more of Oz, a good thing too as the weather in Sydney was still dreadful. The plan: to meet Kat & Di in Brisbane and take a drive down to Byron Bay for a weekend of camping. This was all pretty exciting for us, as after 3 months in ... read more

Good old Catchphrase, the Aussies would have been good at it. That is how they name things. The harbour here is actually called Port Jackson, but the name was a bit complicated so everyone refers to it as Sydney Harbour. On the banks of said harbour is the Sydney Opera House and the bridge that crosses the harbour is, yes you have guessed it, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The most popular beer in New South Wales is Tooheys and they sell two main products, Tooheys Old and Tooheys New. Presumably because one has been around longer than the other. Then there are the mountain ranges: the Snowy Mountains are the mountains which get most of the snow and the Blue Mountains are, erm, blue. Yup they really are blue, which is a good job as the ... read more

(This one got a bit stuck in the ether ... sorry about that) Perth really is a long way from the rest of Australia. We had been told this before (when we were also told about Bali being its nearest city) but it took the 5 hour flight out for all that to sink in. That flight also enabled Marissa to catch up on some much needed kip and me on some much needed movies. And so we landed in Melbourne. Our hosts for this week: the lovely Tom and Suzy. Although it wasn’t quite that simple. They were away for the weekend so Tom had devised an excellent mission for us in the style of the Krypton Factor - all swing bridges and crocodiles. The prize … the keys to their flat. We thought his ... read more