Our long haul flight from Singapore had just touched down when the pilot asked - ´We have now landed in Sydney?´.´Well, mate´, I thought, ´you should bloody well know! Engage map and brain before landing gear, eh?` Then it struck us (years of Neighbours and Rolf Harris should have made clear from the start) we were in Australia, everyone inflects the end of their sentences, just to confuse Pommies. We spent the night in Sydney and then got straight back on ...

We left Railay with sore arms but equipped with 2 new skills - the ability to lead climb and the knowledge of how to play S***head...floating back to the mainland on a long boat we waved goodbye to the blue water and white karsts. Next destination? A retracing of steps back to Laos - this time to Luang Prabang to meet up with my parents who had decided to come and check up on us, making sure we were eating our greens, brushing our teeth...stuff like that. The tr...

Hanging upside down, 25 metres up a rock face I realised that if I fell now I was going to swing about 8 metres down past the jaggedy rocks below...this is supposed to be fun, I thought, a two day journey for this? Then I wondered if I was insured for this kind of malarkey...We had arrived in Railay exhausted. The trip had involved an overnight bus from Pakse arriving at 5am in Bangkok where we spent a two days sampling the street food (fried grasshopper included...

We have never before gone anywhere to do nothing. That would be odd. However, for some reason that´s exactly what we did. After days of bumpy roads on a motorbike it just seemed right. As such we went south to Don Det with only one plan - not to sit down on our painful behinds. The trip there was fine, bus followed by a little long boat ferry to the Island, a pretty place, little bamboo huts lining both sides of the island and lots of farmland with water buffal...

Start Location:Taat Hua KhonEnd Location:Pakse, AgainDistance:92kmWe woke up to the sound of the waterfall in the near distance and a cockerel making as much noise as it could right underneath the flimsy bamboo flooring beaneath our bed. With the bike tyre fully replaced we decided to take the `unsealed road´ back to Pakse is what would be a pretty long day of biking/scootering. The route we had chosen was said to be one of the most beautiful and rural in Laos, ...