Saz and Jarms

On arrival into Cairns airport we were greeted with a friendly "G'day" from the security man, and happily settled into our hostel, the infamous Gilligans. We spent our first few nights in Australia drinking, naturally, and had a great time meeting new people in Gilligan's own nightclub. The highlights of our nightlife had to be playing a crazy game of 'Bogan Bingo', driving round in an open top party bus, and watching too many wet T-shirt competitions! When we weren't hungover we managed to spend a day at the lagoon (in the north lagoon's tend to be favoured over the ocean because of the crazy amount of sharks hanging around), and we did a day trip to Atherton Tablelands. Here we walked through the rainforest, swung on vines, and swam in a couple of freezing waterfalls; ... read more

We arrived into Kota Kinabalu, the capital city, and spent a couple of days checking out the area and planning our stay. One day was spent sunbathing on the beautiful island of Manukan, part of a national park, and another at Mount Kinabalu Park where we walked a few trails through the forest at the bottom of the humungous mountain, unfortuantely it was cloudy and we couldn't see the peak! In order to avoid the screechy, ridiculously loud woman that sang in the bar opposite every single night, we headed down to a little Italian restaurant and discovered their amazingly tasty bread basket with garlic dip, mmmm! Definitely beats the frog porridge of Singapore. We next headed to the east coast of Sabah, to Sandakan. We soon realised their wasn't a great deal to do there ... read more

After our last messy night in Vietnam, we were a little worse for wear getting up for our 8 hour bus journey to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Luckily crossing the border proved to be fairly easy this time and we arrived at the hostel to say a final farewell to the legend that is Bryan Fitzgerald. We were a little sceptical about Phnom Penh having heard it's dodgy from other travellers, and passing a prostitute on the stairs to our room at 4pm. But we went down to some bars by the river and it was fine, quite a nice place actually! The must-see things in Phnom Penh are S-21 and the Killing Fields, so we headed there the next day. S-21 is a high school turned security prison where the Cambodians were detained and tortured under ... read more

Good morning Vietnam! Well actually it was evening when we arrived but you get the idea. Our first stop on our coastal trip down Vietnam was Hanoi, the capital. We were told before arriving that when crossing the road you should close your eyes and walk out (as the motorbikes will go round you), this proved to be useful as the city is chaos with motorbikes. The whole city was noisy, dirty, hot and just a bit of a hectic place to navigate. Luckily 3 of our friends from Thailand were already here so we met them and escaped for the day by going to the mall, a bit of a treat! Watched transformers 3 and had a thoroughly western day. Our next escape of the city came in the form of a 3 day tour ... read more

On arrival in Chiang Mai we were greeted by rain, and a lot of it. The North is definitely rainier than the South with at least one downpour per day. We decided to do a one-day trek and fortunately the weather was on our side. After an early wake up we were taken to an orchid and butterfly farm, not exactly the highlight of the day but Dave was in his element. After this we headed up into the mountains to start the trekking, with Tuck our trusty guide. He certainly looked the part with his bamboo hat and machete. The walk through the jungle was fun, with awesome views across the valleys, and Tuck pausing to show us different things like making paper aeroplanes out of grass, bubbles out of plants and cutlery out of ... read more