Dear Stuart, Jan, Caitlin & Euan Banks Time moves quickly now. Minutes are passing like hours and hours are passing like days. Before we know it, we are going to wake up and this wonderful adventure will be over. We know this and have accepted it and so are making every day count a little bit more. To help with that, we have used your very generous wedding gift to buy not one but two boat trips out to some beautiful tropical paradise islands. It's all a bi...

Dear Reem, Simon and Aria At the beginning of our trip, back in October, we stayed in our first beachside accommodation on Koh Tao. Who would have thought that five months later, we would still not get bored of sitting on a beach, watching sunsets and enjoying beautiful weather at what is possibly our last beachside accommodation of the trip. Sitting with your toes in the warm soft sand, being able to swim in the pool at any time of day or night, having the to...

Goodbye New Zealand And so after two months in this fine country, we wave goodbye and part on good terms. We've had some good times, we've had some times we thought were ok at the time but looking back were also good times and we have had some very good times. But like a lover who you thought was good but then found out had a few unnamed sexually transmitted diseases, it is time to go our separate ways. Not that I am saying that New Zealand is rife with STDs or ...

Dear Simone and Jamie Thank you for buying us Staying in a s***hole for our wedding gift. We had hoped that we didn't need to use it and we had survived this far but unfortunately failed at the last hurdle in New Zealand. Let me tell you about the Happy Apple hostel in Motueka. We might have got a bit lazy by the time we picked this place because I think we based it purely on that fact that it had a good name. That would explain why we ended up in a twin room ...

Dear The Grimseys Six years ago when I was living in Wellington, I won a bet with a woman in a nightclub. She didn't believe that there was a small town on the west coast of the South Island called Barrytown and in Barrytown you could go and spend your day making your own knife. The prize for winning the bet was free coffee if I was to ever go to the coffee shop she owned in Te Aro Valley. At the time and still to this day, I have never liked coffee so it was ...