So it's not quite the same writing from our flat in Crystal Palace, with the trains, number 410 buses and chip-munching school kids interrupting me with their noises, but I didn't get a chance to talk about Vanuatu in Vanuatu or describe California during our flying visit to the US, so here goes. We left Auckland on a sunny morning in early August - the first for days after storms battered the region, and flew to Fiji where we spent a night. At Mama's Pizza in...

New Zealand Since we arrived we have spent our days winding through some of the most consistently stunning scenery we've ever seen and our nights gorging on home-cooked foods (steak, bangers and mash, bolognese - all those things we were dreaming of) and guzzling a lot of wine. We have put on a couple of kilos, our guts feel a like they do after some serious Christmas bingeing, but it has all been, as they say here, awesome. We arrived in Christchurch after a ...

Makassar - Balikpapan - Kutai National Park - Derawan Island - Banjarmasin Look at a map of Kalimantan and you can see there are not many roads, which should have given us an inkling. Forget India and Burma, travelling around Kalimantan has been the coup de grace to our wistful, wishful notions that we were now hardened backpackers ready for anything. Ah, hindsight. We had an inauspicious start - buckled up and ready to take off at Makassar airport in Sulawesi,...

Bangkok - Perhentian Islands - Kuala Lumpur - Bali - Manado - Togean Islands - Tana Toraja - Makassar Sulawesi is like nowhere I've been before: the sky seems vast, the horizon is always dramatic and the land is carpeted a rich green. This beautiful, crazy place has seduced us all. We arrived in Manado three weeks or so ago on a flight from Bali. Find Sulawesi (its odd-shaped limbs straddle the equator) on a map and Manado is almost at its northernmost tip. A n...

Bangkok - Siem Reap - Vientiane - Vang Viang - Luang Prabang - Luang Namtha - Chiang Rai - Bangkok And so back to Bangkok once more. This city is a shock after Laos, with its miles of malls and flyovers and traffic jams. In Laos roads are all single carriage and there are, as yet, no golden arches. That's not to say Laos and Cambodia hadn't changed in the 10 years since I last saw (a very little bit of) them. The roads in Vientiane, Laos's sleepy capital, are no...