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...

Bangkok - Yangon - Mandalay - Bagan - Kalaw - Lake Inle - Yangon - Bangkok Indian buses, Indian roads - all is forgiven! We spent a total of around 53 bottom-numbing, bone-crunching hours on Burmese buses, all old Japaneses coaches and minibuses more suited for the school run in suburban Tokyo than a 12-hour trip along pot-holed and monsoon-eaten roads and rather hairy hairpin bends, with people and bags of onions crammed down the aisle on plastic stools and on ...

Alapuzzha - Cochin - Gokarna - Agonda - Mumbai - Bangkok We are in Bangkok and the sun has just come out after a downpour. It rained at the same time yesterday, as we made our way by taxi from the airport to the Khao San Road, a shock after the round-the-clock sunshine in India, but the heat is just as oppressive. For anyone who has ever been to the Khao San Road, it's sort of the same as it was, but a lot bigger and louder. Alongside Boots, which was here when...