The next stop on our trip was Trujillo. This is a smallish town in Extremadura. I think it is fair to say we are well off the English tourist trail and we do need to use our rather bad Spanish. We are in the nicest hotel so far. It is an old convent that is now a 4* hotel. The conversion has been done well and there are some super modern lights and art work which look really good. The room where we had breakfast used to be a chapel. Impressive! The problem with such a nice hotel is that we tend to stick out. The rest of the guests are well heeled Spanish tourists and don't seem to have the rucksacs, hats and trainers that we have! I think they must be wondering where we ... read more

We are currently in Salamanca which was about 1.5hrs drives away. We have learnt our lesson with TomTom and this time we typed in the address rather than just pick the hotel off the list. We made it with no problems, lets hope that continues. We are living it up in a four star hotel - it is the type of luxury we could get used to. Look at the view from the pool. Jealous? Salamanca is a great city and it seems very relaxed. It has a massive student population and one of the oldest universities in Europe. The university has really impressive building. One of the main gates has a very impressive façade. It attracts a lot of attention as somewhere on it there is a frog. There are various stories about the frog ... read more

Tim and I decided to give up our Sunday and do the Oxfam walk today, which as the name suggests is a walk to raise money for Oxfam. I know doing the walk doesn't really count as travelling but seeing as I am not going on holiday for a while I thought I would write a blog anyway! There has been a bit of a heatwave of late so we had an amazingly sunny day for our walk. It was 13 miles which was a nice distance. It took us 4.5 hours from start to finish including a bit of a sit down in the middle. The walk started at Wimpole Hall, the National Trust property, and took us west towards East Hatley then north towards Longstowe before heading south back towards Wimpole. It was very ... read more

We are in Lisbon! It is very nice but very hilly so we are exhausted! We never thought we would appreciate the flatness of East Anglia. Due to the hilliness of Lisbon and the fact that most of the streets are very narrow and windy we spend most of our time not being entirely sure where we are! We have had 2 days exploring Lisbon. the first day we went to Belém which is a district that is a 6km away. It is home to a Pastéis de Belém - a shop which is famous for making custard tarts. Needless to say we had to go here and sample one! The shop was very busy and apparently on busy days they sell 10s of thousands of these things! We also saw some of the other sights ... read more

The holiday is almost over!! Just got the long trek back to the UK to go (can't wait!) The last day and a half of holiday was spent back on Bophut Beach on Koh Samui. This time we are up the other end of the beach in the fisherman's village which was more to our liking. The hotels are smaller here and there are a lot more places to eat. The other end is a bit too big resorty for my liking. Our hotel is run by an English couple. The woman could be Margo from The Good Life. She even looks like her! Whilst we have been here we have walked on the beach, played in the pool and generally chilled out. I am not looking forward to getting back to cold Britain!... read more