With only 3 weeks to scratch the surface of Australia we knew we'd struggle to fit in all the things that we wanted to see, but nevertheless set off on an antipodean odyssey running (at times literally) down the east coast from Brisbane to Melbourne with a small detour to Fraser Island off the Queensland coast. This installment of the blog is sure to be a bit of a bumper installment and for that I can only apologise. So, are we all sitting comfortably? Then I'l...

New Zealand: a land bigger than the UK that contains only four million people - and 1.2 million of those live in the largest city, Auckland.Our task, if we chose to accept it, was a 3000 mile drive around both islands in a camper van that Kate had dubbed 'Bernadette' - a name I found acceptable, but that was mostly so that I could hum 'Bernadette' by the Four Tops every time the van was mentioned.With Petrol at approximately one pound per litre, it was also going...

In my life I have travelled on planes, buses, bikes, cars, boats, trains, trams and the number 11 bus, but travelling between Saigon and Phnom Penh represented a first for me - my first ride on a car ferry! I know that some of you may consider me sheltered given this revelation, and god knows Kate has given me enough stick about it, but there it is. I can reveal that it was a truly wonderful experience - all 5 minutes of it. Upon arrival in Cambodia's capital we...

The journey from hell wasn't quite as hellish as we'd thought it might be, though perhaps the bus company might want to rethink it's branding of the bus as a "sleeper". Very little sleep was had as the seats were a) only about 4ft long when reclined, b) half of that was the "foot coffin" that you couldn't actually get your legs into and c) the roads were so windy that if you could manage to get comfortable you risked rocking out of your ...

As the crow flies, there are exactly 214 miles between our last destination in Thailand, Chiang Mai, and the next stop on our tour, Luang Prabang in Laos, so why it took us three days to get between the two is quite baffling. Our trip involved local buses, tourist buses, tuc-tucs, slow boats, small speed boats and the good old number 11 bus (our legs!) - all coming together to create one hell of a journey! We started making our way to the border on a collection o...