Saturday 21st April 2018 This morning we had to be up really early at 5.30 a.m. to pack our rucksacks and fly to Sandakan. We left the rucksacks at the hostel in Kota Kinabalu and just took our small backpacks with gear for three nights. The GRAB taxi picked us up at 6.30 a.m. and we got to the airport just after 7.00 a.m. in good time for departure at 8.30. By 9.30 we were landing in Sandakan and were met by our bus driver for the journey to the Sungai Kinabatangan (River Kinabatangan) about three hours’ drive away. The second pick up in Sandakan was for a young Latvian couple, who were extremely late (no apology to either us or the driver). They were nearly half an hour late and the anxious driver had to ... read more

Nine years ago we wrote ‘Kuala Lumpur is Knockout Lovely’. Well, it still is! KL is a vibrant, bustling, noisy, cosmopolitan city and we love it. Getting here was somewhat taxing but that is all part of travelling. We left Hampshire at 17.20 on Sunday and twenty two hours later we arrived at our little hotel in Chinatown in KL, at 22.20 on Monday, which would be 15.20 GMT (seven hour time difference) and 16.20 CET at home in Spain (six hour time difference). Why such a long journey? Well, true to form, we arrived in a major tempest which is how we usually manage to arrive in foreign parts! Last time we flew in to Singapore, for example, lightning struck and moved our bus on route from the airport! This wasn’t quite so dramatic, however ... read more

The rucksacks are packed and we are almost organised at home. The automatic watering system is now up and running in the garden, our two dogs, Mutley and Megan, have been to the vets: annual jabs endured, check-ups undertaken, tick collars attached and we have all of their medicines sorted. Our big dog, Mutley is epileptic so a great Tupperware box of drugs is ready to accompany him to our son Nick’s house next Tuesday afternoon. We read somewhere that the way to pack is to lay everything out then halve it! Well, we haven’t needed to do that because amazingly almost everything fitted in; just a few things were discarded and relegated back to the wardrobe! Having packed the rucksacks for backpacking before, this isn’t really surprising. The list isn’t really different each time. Once ... read more

Thursday 9thJuly 2015 We came back to Brazil yesterday, back to the same hotel as before in Foz de Iguazu. The weather has been pretty bad all week. It was really lucky that we went on the speedboat last Sunday, because since then, until today, it has been nonstop rain and dark grey skies; pretty dismal. It brightened a bit this morning, although it was still very cloudy, no sunshine, so we went to a bird sanctuary just about a half hours walk from the hotel. The reason that we came back to Foz, was to treat ourselves to a helicopter trip over the falls. We have been both sides and under them, so we thought we would “round off” by flying over them. Such flights are not on offer in Argentina, only here in Brazil. ... read more

Puerto Iguazu is a small border town which until 1880 was only inhabited by the Guarani Indians. It’s now a town focussed almost entirely on tourism due to the increasing popularity of the Iguazu Falls. Most tourists are South American. It is a great little town in a lovely setting, with the Rio Iguazu and Brazil to the north and the Rio Paraná and Paraguay to the west. Twenty kilometres to the east lie the falls themselves and rainforest surrounds it all. As we are writing this blog, Argentina are playing Chile (in Chile) in the final of the America Cup. Fireworks heralded the start of the game an hour ago but at the moment the score is 0-0 so it is quiet and tense as the whole nation stays glued to the TV screens. Today ... read more