Even a cursory glance at the internet will tell you that the question of which 3 things would be best to have to hand in the event that you happened to find yourself stranded on a desert island is a well debated and much discussed problem. We can exclusively reveal that the answers are not the common 'penknife, iPod and a book' but 3 much more important items... 1) Hot Water Shower with built in salt remover...7 weeks of cold saltwater showers really bring hom...

Having spent a night in Denpasar near Bali airport we moved on to the unremarkable port side town of Padangbai - a gateway to the Gili Islands which were next on our hitlist of beaches. Padangbai itself is only to be tolerated, yes there are a number of dive shops and decent restaurants but these are outnumbered 5 to 1 by the local touts. This can be the local guys who sit on motorbikes outside the only ATM in town which they know fine well is always broken ...

There are those times where you consider yourself to be wide awake but then things begin to happen that raise the suspicion that you are, in fact, dreaming and about to wake up and wake up you usually do. Most recently this happened while trekking through the Sumatran rainforest sweat soaked, insect covered, generally dirty and drinking a cup of tea made from water pulled straight from the adjacent river (90% tea, 10% floaty bits of stuff) when the local ind...

So, we left India having had enough of temples, rats and, most importantly, tipping people and decided it was most definitely time for the beach. With the decision made we packed our bags and began the trip to Indonesia. This meant a pretty long trip - with our flight from India landing in Singapore we stayed a night, moved on to Kuala Lumpur for 3 nights and finally managed to get on a plane to Sumatra (which is not in Africa…you probably know this already ...