MartinNL

Saw that this blog was still waiting to be published. I never quite got around to writing the text for it. And hey, it's only about 1,5 years ago now so that's hardly surprising :) Anyway since I went through the trouble of sorting, resizing and captioning the photo's I might as well post them. After our first stay in Thailand we went to Laos and travelled down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang and from there north to a little village in the mountains, all by boat. Then back to LP and on to Vientiane, to cross the border back into Thailand. I was a bit disappointed by Laos, maybe because I had quite high expectations. For a supposedly untouristy country it was all very organized: we weren't allowed to take normal busses, only tourist ... read more

As promised, I’ll continue my update with the next country on our list: Cambodia. It will be in two parts since there is much to tell and the temples of Angkor Wat really deserve their own blog. We left Saigon on the Mekong Express bus to Phnom Penh after an enjoyable stay in Vietnam, very much looking forward to coming back some time to explore the beautiful coastline and many other sights Vietnam has to offer. There are many bus companies running this 400-odd kilometer route, but Mekong Express came highly recommended by many other travelers and with good reason. The buses are clean and comfortable with friendly, English speaking guides, a toilet and even a complimentary breakfast or lunch, cold water and a wet wipe. While this may seem fairly normal, bus travel in Asia, ... read more

Hello from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It's a great city with good food, great architecture and nice people (not to mention 35 degrees, 90+ percent humidity and corrupt police). However, the news is not all good. We arrived here on Friday after spending about a week in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City if you prefer - another great city. We had a brilliant day with really good food and some nice locals but at night disaster struck. In the room next to ours a pipe burst around midnight, flooding the entire first floor with about 10cm of water. We were first aware of this when we got up to check out what the noise was about and stepped ankle deep in water... next to our bed. As we had only just arrived, our ... read more

After our very memorable trip up to Mount Bromo as the conclusion of our visit to Java, it was time to leave this first island and move to the in this great nation of Islands. The trip was another pretty long one but at least this time we were on a comfortable bus with legroom and the voyage was broken up by a trip on the ferry between the islands. Originally our plan was to bypass the tourist hell of Kuta, in south Bali but since we wanted to book a ticket to Flores from here and had to go to the airport to do so, we decided to spend one night there. Things turned out a bit different and anyway, Kuta turned out not to be all that bad, well not for a day or ... read more

If there’s such a place as Europe in Australia then I think we’ve found it: the South-West. Between the forests, the vineyards and the hills it’s often a little like Germany. Since my last report we’ve traveled further down. We were in Yallingup, on the northern end of the ‘bulge’ of South-West WA and we’re now in Denmark, on the southern side. A different ocean crashes onto the shores here, the Pacific Ocean -although the Australians call it the Southern Ocean. We continued our wine and food tasting with a visit to Vasse Felix Estate, quite a large vineyard north of Margaret River who make a very impressive range of reds and whites. We tasted most of them, from their entry level wines up to the flagship reserves and even after visiting some more wineries afterwards, ... read more