On Friday 8th October, we visited the Tuol Sleng ‘S.21’ Prison and the Cheong Ek Killing Fields. Words can’t do any justice to the pain, suffering and inhumanity we saw and experienced. Rather than try, and fail, to portray the day, I have decided to take a slightly different approach to this blog. I will copy the text from the leaflet at the Tuol Sleng prison to give a background to what happened, and then let the pictures we took speak for themselves. I will apologise now for the graphic nature of the photos, but it best portrays the chilling and emotional scenes we saw. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former security office 21 in “Democratic Kampuchea” was created on orders of Pol Pot (Sa lut Sor) on April 17th 1975. Office 21 was called S-21 ... read more

Siem Reap, the City of Smiles. Whether it’s friendly guesthouse owners, ‘tuk tuk’ drivers, semi clothed children playing in the dirt or landmine amputees with haunted eyes, everyone here had a smile for us. Despite the horrendous recent history of Cambodia, from genocide and landmines to foreign invasions and the dark trade of children in the sex industry, we have arrived in one of the friendliest places on earth. Sure, they want a share of the dollars in your wallet, but when confronted with the suffering and poverty that they are, who can blame them. Following the tribulations of our eventful journey from Pattaya, we arrived at the Golden TaKeo guesthouse, just across the river from the main centre of town. All we wanted was some air conditioning, a warm shower and a comfortable bed to ... read more

Hi everyone, it's Rach. At the moment we're in Cambodia and have been for 4 days. We were supposed to be moving on today but after waking up not feeling great (either through anti-malarial tablets or through the food) we decided a 6 hour bus journey wouldn't be too great. So as Stu lies in bed feeling ill I thought I'd give this blog a go. I must tell you now though it will not be as entertaining or informative as Stus' have been. But don't despair he'll be back in top form to tell you all about our Asian adventures. For now it's back to Sydney. We arrived in Sydney on Tuesday 28th September and as we were leaving on the 30th, we had made sure that we had a full few days ahead of ... read more

It seems that after ruining our trip to the glaciers, almost killing us on the road back from Doubtful Sound and almost blowing our campervan over numerous times, New Zealand's weather decided to have one last, cruel laugh at us. We took the long drive from Queenstown to Lake Tekapo via a couple of interesting stops. First off was AJ Hackett's Bungy Centre. Mr Hackett is the founder of bungy jumping and the gorge we stopped at allowed lunatics to jump from a bridge attached to some of Dawn French's knicker elastic for the bargain price of $100 dollars! After watching a few people take the plunge and a couple wimp out at the the last minute, we got back on the road and trudged on towards Mt Cook. The weather was beautiful, sunshine and very ... read more

Our New Zealand adventure continued as we drove south from the glaciers past a very wet and wild Knights Point, and then cut east across a very snowy Haast Pass. The town of Haast is on the west coast and to access the east side of the Southern Alps we needed to drive up and across the Pass of the same name. With the weather as it was, the brilliant white snow made the scene look beautiful and very wintery. Due to the amount of rainfall over the few days before, there were a lot of very pretty waterfalls tumbling down amongst the white snow, gunmetal grey cliffs and green foliage. We were very thankful that it was a little late in the day and the snow had cleared from the road so that we didn’t ... read more