We left Ubud after a great few days for the Gili islands, 3 small islands which were supposed to have amazing beaches. We were picked up early and driven to the port in the town of Padangbai about an hour away, where you get the boats to the Gili's from. This town is pretty small and people mainly only go through it to get the boats to/from the Gili's. After a bit of messing about (swapping tickets over, being herded from bus to boat etc), we hopped on the 'fast' boat which was due to take 2 hours to get to Gili Trawangan, the biggest of the 3 islands. Gili Meno and Gili Air are the other 2, one is inhabitable and the other is very quiet. After about 3 hours (common theme in Asia- buses/boats ... read more

After just a few months back in London we were sick of the cold weather and daily grind, so booked oursleves a trip to Bali - backpacker style! We got the backpacks out and planned a rough 2 week itinerary around Bali and the Gili Islands. First stop - Kuta... After a really long (but good) 16 hour flight with Singapore Air to Bali via Singapore, we arrived at Kuta airport around 11pm and immediately noticed how crazy it was - welcome back to Asia, how we'd missed you! We got a taxi to a small hotel that we had pre-booked online, but soon hit traffic on a one way street - it was a Friday night and so Kuta was heaving with so many people and cars that our taxi driver said we'd be better ... read more

We finally arrived in Krabi 4 hours late, after having to swap buses twice and wait around for ages, and when we did arrive we were dropped at a tourist trap of a 'bus station' which was just a hut in the middle of no where with the only overpriced transport around. We were tired by this point though so got a shared taxi to Ao Nang, the area we had stayed before in Krabi, and found a great room at a guesthouse next door to where we stayed last time we were here in November. As it was getting late we just went for some dinner and got an early night, but were up early the next morning as the weather was great. Before we went to the beach we stopped at a massage place ... read more

We arrived at the ferry port on the 30th after our luxurious overnight bus journey from Bangkok and waited an hour for the ferry that would take us to Koh Phangan, which took a further 2 ½ hours before we arrived, but we then had to get a taxi for another 40 minutes as we were staying at the northern end of the island which didn’t have fully paved roads. To say the roads were bumpy is an understatement – although it was only 18km from the port the journey took so long because over half of the ‘roads’ are nothing more than mud tracks! We made it though and checked into a lovely hotel - kindly booked by Scott's mum & dad for xmas (Thanks guys!), right on the beach, where we would be for ... read more

We arrived in Siem Reap early on Christmas Eve and got a tuk tuk to our hotel, which we were really looking forward to as we treated ourselves for xmas and books a really nice hotel. When we got there it was just gorgeous and the service was great- it’s so nice to have a bit of luxury every now and again! We had arranged with our tuk tuk driver to go to Angkor Wat that evening, the oldest temple in history, to see the sunset so had the whole day to ourselves, and as it was early we went into the town to try and book somewhere for Christmas dinner the next day as we both wanted a traditional roast. We found an Irish pub called Molly Malones which was doing a roast so we ... read more