Overland Adventure 2007

We had decided to stop in the Chitwan National park on the way into India, but this meant going down a road with a very bad reputation of cars and buses flying off the edge into the valley below, so we decided o get the tourist bus as this is the safest way to go apparently. The bus we were shown when we booked the ticket was nothing like what appeared to pick us up on the morning of the journey, it was an extremely old bus!! As we wound our way down the Kathmandu valley hundreds of old Nepali lorries chugged up the hill, beeping constantly. The local buses and mini vans were overtaking at every opportunity even on blind corners, no wonder there are so many accidents! Our bus was very slow though so ... read more

We left the small town of Muong Ngoy for our hour boat ride back to Nong Khiaw in hope of getting a bus to Luang Prabang the same day. When we arrived there was a bus waiting, we all piled on to the extent that there were people sitting in the middle of the tuk tuk on deck chairs, I had one bum cheek inside the bus and one out, with my legs off the back and there were 4 more hanging off the back. No one was too sure if the tuk tuk would even make it the 4 hours back to Luang Prabang. I got off to stretch my legs one more time and saw a huge bubble in the side of the tyre that was being flattened by the weight of all the ... read more

After a couple of days in Bangkok we were ready to leave the madness of it, our Laos visa would have taken four days because of the public holiday so we decided to just try and get it on the border. We left on the overnight bus to Chaing Mai as it was half the price of the train. It was the usual walk along koh san road to pick everyone up from their guest houses before getting on the bus. When we arrived at the bus it looked pretty good but it had tyre’s in the same state as Schumacher’s. We couldn’t quite understand why the bus would take 12 hours but it was due to the fact that we travelled painfully slowly, it was probably the worst night trip I have been on, the ... read more

So its been a long while since I last wrote, about a year and four months long, the last 11 months have been spent working, working, working to save enough money for the trip home. Before that we spent 5 months travelling in Australia, 3 of those were spent driving around in a camper in convoy with my parents in their camper - it was brilliant even if it did rain all the time! My parents got to experience the luxuries of being a poor backpacker - sorry about that Mum and Dad! So now after 2 years of being away its time to start heading home. The plan is to head up to Auckland, kayak down the Whanganui river for 5 days then head off on our flight to our second home - Bangkok! From ... read more

Well we landed safely in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, yey. We have a couple of days in this pleasant little capital and then spent a night on Tiga Island, where the Borneo Survivor programme was filmed. There was no one else staying which was a bit spooky, but we had a good hike across the island to a Mud Volcano. Of course we went in and got covered and you could float in it like a ball pool. We then got the bus across to Sepilok to visit the Orang Utan Rehabilitation Centre, were you can walk out on to a platform built into the reserve and watch the rehabilitated apes swinging out of the jungle to a feeding platform. We went for both feeding times of bananas and milk, seeing about 8-10 Orang Utans just 5-10m ... read more