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 but I am reliably informed that, unbelievably, many Scottish, 28 year olds do not…). This made it 4 countries in 5 days and, as if we had not had enough of travelling, on landing in Banda Aceh it was straight in a taxi to the ferry port and then onto a boat to Pulau Weh in the very far north of the country. Pulau Weh is a beautiful, volcanic tropical island with a number of (nearly) untouched beaches dotted around the coastline.

It is now pertinent to highlight just how much work went in to organising our trip away this year. With no firm plan we based our route on the complex global weather systems via electronic world wide web research based methodologies and statistical analysis…that is to say Eleanor went on the internet and looked on the BBC website. The conclusion was:

'We should DEFINITELY go to Pulau Weh in August, it looks beautiful and the weather then is PERFECT.'

Obviously, there is not going to be a reason why this has just been mentioned…

Getting back to the point - we arrived on Gapang Beach which gave us the first impressions of being very beutiful indeed, I think... it was very difficult to tell with all the rain (that's right rain, rain and more...rain). Gapang, being a beach, has key highlights which predominantely revolve around it being sunny such as, sand.Other local attractions included a number of restaurants and a great dive school… it was also Ramadan and so all but 2 places to eat were closed and they both sold exactly the same food. That left the diving so we got stuck in.

Joking aside, we had gone there specifically to dive and the diving was fantastic. About 100m off the shore the water depth hits around 150m so there is not far to travel to go to some great dive sites and with a number of small land masses dotted around the main island the sea flow around these gives rise to quite a lot of current and current attracts lots of fish.

As the weather brightened up we ended up staying for over a week -diving during the day and drinking the local beer with the only other 10 tourists every night...if it wasn't for the food it would have been pretty difficult to tear ourselves away but tear away we will. Next stage of our trip - the ferry to Banda Aceh, a sleeper bus to Medan and another bus to Bukit Lawang, the Indonesian Rainforest and (hopefully) some Orangutans…