We got to Salvador on Friday 20th Feb and Carnaval had just started. The journey from the airport (yes we cheated) was a new experience for us in terms of sights - seeing the favelas on the hillsides crowded with crumbling buildings, built-up tower blocks and bits of rainforest. It was very different to what we had seen in Asia and Europe. Salvador is gorgeous - well the Pelourinho is anyway - lots of restored colonial architecture, cobbled streets and churc...

Any comment about New Zealand wouldn't be complete without mentioning geographically diversity. In just a few weeks we saw beaches, plains, rolling hills, mountains, glaciers fringed by subtropical forests, ravines, meadows, geothermal wastelands and volcanic mud pools. And Auckland, probably the most underrated city we've been too so far, a place that felt a bit like home - in a good way. We stayed in Ponsonby at Scott's, a friend of Em's from Nottingham. He ...

Unfortunately (though quite avoidably) we arrived in Melbourne a day later than David and Chloe were expecting us. Its not our first error with dates, but at least we haven't missed a flight yet. We successfully found their house but knowing that they were out 'til 1pm we sat in their garden waiting patiently for them to return. I have never known heat like this (and this was only a fraction of how hot it became after we left Melbourne). The wind was actually li...

We had a good time in Singapore - it was the start of a two month long hectic schedule. I'm writing this from Rotorua, New Zealand. In two days we fly to Rio and then straight onto Salvador for the Carnaval - so the pace is set to continue. We had a great time in Singapore thanks to Tasneem and Joakim, our couchsurfing hosts. As with all the people we've stayed with over the last 6 months, they gave us a glimpse of real life and used their local knowledge to hel...

Picking up from where we last left off - just about to leave Laos for Thailand, about December 20th. As soon as we got on the bus we knew things would be different in Thailand, 'Step Up 2' was the film on the bus, not the Chinese version of Police Academy, which I can recommend. After the film, which Em loved, the Essex girls sitting behind us asked to put their Al Pacino DVD on, but when the credits rolled it turned out to be a bad copy of a film starring Leo...