After Dan's unfortunate departure back to the UK, I continued by flying up to North Queensland and starting in Cairns. The wet season had unfortunately started early in Cairns so the first couple of days were a bit damp. However, I stayed at a hostel quite near the centre of the city so it was easy to get to the main attractions. The first couple of days I took in the esplanade and famous lagoon by the sea. It was a great place to chill out and it went on for mil...

The first stop in Australia was Sydney, and a great place to start off seeing the country. After arriving and finding a hostel in the King's Cross area we started by walking to the botanical gardens near the Opera House. We had no idea how beautiful they would be and we ended up spending a few days during our weeks stay just reading and relaxing in them. The views out to the harbour were amazing, showing off both the harbour bridge and Opera House as well as all ...

Our final stop in Laos was Luang Prabang where we spent around a week taking in the World Heritage city. We had a bit of time left over so that was the reason for staying a week but it's a great place to waste time. We actually arrived at the perfect time as the city was preparing for a big light festival to mark the end of the rainy season. All the little surrounding villages and some within the city made boats and decorated them brightly before going on a proce...

We arrived in Vang Vieng thinking it would be very touristy which it was but we also did some of our best activities here and really enjoyed our week-long stay. The town itself is set amongst lots of mini-mountains and every direction you look you can see clouds forming at the peaks. It's a beautiful place and after a few days we started by renting out some bikes and pedalling our way around the outskirts of the town. It was quite tiring in the heat but was well...

After a quick stop in Hanoi to see its best museum and opera house, we decided to move on to Laos. This was mainly due to Hanoi celebrating its 1000th birthday so it was even more chocca-block than it usually is! So we took on the 24 hour bus to Vientiane, the capital. It was by no means as bad as people had been making out and even the border crossing was no hassle (it helped that we had sorted out our visas already in Hanoi). We travelled with a decent group of...