Note: The following entry is taken from my travel journals during a stopover in South Africa in 1995, and parts ot the text have been updated. In general, it still needs editing and is written in a very rough note form. At the time, I was travelling home with my father after a tour of Australia. Our plane arrived in Johannesburg at the ridiculously early time of just after five in the morning, which gave us an entire day to do our own thing before having to catc...

Not only had I managed to get us upgraded to a hill villa - something we would only have been able to afford when booking if we had sold our souls to the travel devil - but we could go straight away. Luckily, we hadn't actually got around to unpacking yet as the pull of the resort had been too strong and we had literally dumped everything we had and gone out exploring the moment we arrived. Collecting our bags from where we had left them - luckily, the monkey had...

You may have seen places such as the Pangkor Laut Resort on television travel shows, the ones where the scripts are so far removed from reality that you'd need cupboards stuffed with banknotes and clothes weaved from gold in order to visit any of the destinations they suggest. It's the sort of place you go on your honeymoon, or after you've won the lottery, or when you receive Richard Branson's credit card in the mail by accident. It's quite expensive, I think is...

If you've just tuned in, spotting the words "Kuala Lumpur" on the front page of OffExploring and looking forward to my description of a vibrant city overflowing with sex, drugs and rock and roll, I'm afraid you might be in for a bit of a disappointment. Eloise and I have never been a big fan of cities at the best of times, preferring to spend our holidays in the middle of nowhere getting lost among the backstreets of quaint medieval towns, so I don't think you'll...

Sitting in Starbucks, sipping a cappuccino and updating these blogs, I seem to have developed an affliction I shall refer to as "Starbucks arse" - this is what happens when, after spending a couple of hours sitting at an exotic branch of this particular coffee chain, writing up all your travel notes and rearranging them into an order which makes some sort of sense, you decide finally to get up and discover that the air conditioning hasn't worked and that you have...