Josh & Penny have 3 kids and miss being able to travel!
The bus ride from Fez to Chefchaouen was fairly uneventful….the usual lunch stop in the middle of nowhere where you can’t quite figure out what there is to eat but you know that there must be something because there’s men carrying around giant cow ribcages.
(Sorry for the delay, we’ve been away from internet for a while…) Our next day of driving took us through the desert towards Erg Chigaga – a 40km stretch of towering sand dunes in the Sahara. We had originally planned to visit Erg Chebbi, a beautiful and more accessible collection of Saharan dunes, but also…
Once we got off the Tafraoute bus, we stood around waiting for our bags and I was icily rude to the tout who was asking me about what accommodation we were staying in (obviously planning to tell me it’s full/burnt down/infested with rats and take me to his cousin’s hotel).
I can now confirm that if we hadn’t got a guide for our hard core hike, our frozen skeletons would definitely have been discovered weeks later. Instead, our warm bodies were sitting in front of the fire that night at the guesthouse, eating delicious tagines and chatting with the other travellers.
As much as we loved Marrakesh – and there really is nothing like it – we were pretty excited to get out of the city and get some peace and fresh air in the High Atlas Mountains. Our plan to get there seemed fairly straightforward… get a taxi to the bus station to buy our…
I had done the research on activities in Mulu National Park a couple of months ago, so my recollection of the Garden of Eden walk was along the lines of “cave….walking….beautiful….something…..isolated….swimming”. It all sounded very nice and I was determined to do something great since we’d come all the way to Mulu.
Back in Sandakan the next afternoon, we hadn’t showered for three days and I was feeling a little fragile after trying to combine boat trips, hikes and shared toilets with food poisoning. So we booked into a nice hotel…it was only $50 per night but it felt incredibly luxurious. We commented at least a dozen times to each…
Now I have some computer access, I’m going to take you back in time to Uncle Tan’s jungle camp. After we’d seen the proboscis monkeys and orangutans in their sanctuaries, this was our chance to see them in the wild (as tiny pinpricks in the distance, most likely, but in the wild nonetheless). We were…
This morning we got the shuttle to the Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary, about an hour away. Josh was extremely doubtful about the appeal of the monkeys…
Day 2 of diving was equally amazing….we started at a beautiful reef and had luckily managed to lose our diving companion from Day 1. He was a beginner, like us, and managed to constantly cause havoc throughout the dive, kicking us in the head and managing the rip the regulator (breathing piece) out of my…
Following our recent string of small disasters involving any attempt to follow a map while in sparsely populated areas, we were justifiably nervous about venturing into the Dragons Backbone Rice Terraces. Our daring plan (which seemed perfectly reasonable before we found ourselves wheeling bikes through crops and vicious brambles yesterday) was a 5 hour hike between the villages of Pingan and…
It was with much relief that we got on our train to Guilin, leaving Kunming far far behind. We ended up with another fairly vigorous snorer in our sleeping bay, but this time we were armed with ear plugs. Josh joined in the snoring at one point, so I had to lean over and poke…
The first challenge after leaving our lovely guesthouse on the second gorge day was the infamous “28 bends”…a series of steep switchbacks that take you high up the mountain, to its peak at 2500m above sea level. Despite Josh’s claims throughout the climb that he was close to having a heart-attack, we made it to the 28th…
Chengdu may be a smoggy, car choked city with few attractions (or ‘craphole’ if you prefer) but its one major draw-card makes the trip more than worth it.
After we left you last night, we ventured to Bean Curd Pudding Fish restaurant for dinner, being unable to find anywhere else with a better name.
So, we left you in Beijing….right before one of the very helpful hostel staff recommended that we catch the bus to the train station, rather than take the subway as we had planned. I’ve been on a few very overcrowded buses and they always seemed kind of fun…I’m not sure why this particular bus ride…
Yes, there is a reason why I’ve posted a giant photo of my eye…I was trying to demonstrate just how cold it was today as we hiked the Great Wall. Not only did my eyelashes form icicles, so did the water in my bottle (and possibly the linings of my lungs). But with my multiple…