As quickly as we had got our heads around being in eastern Europe, we were already shifting back into the western Europe headspace as we started our detour back to the UK by trekking to Paris for a few days. It was a tough choice where to spend the few days between Prague and Liverpool but in the end Paris won as it was a city we would be visiting anyway, it provided a good and easy point of exit to get back into the UK and, given that it is in the north of France, we could go there without missing out on other cities in France (we hope to get to the south of France at some point).So, Paris it was.

Our experience didn't start off very well, though, as we were hit by our first delayed flight and got to spend a couple extra hours in the airport in Prague. Our luck continued downward when we finally arrived in Paris to find out that the train system out of the airport was temporarily down due to an accident on one of the lines. The ripple effect of this was a bus system that was as disorganized as South Africa home affairs and a two hour wait for a massively overcrowded bus at the airport. Lastly, the bus decided to stop and kick everyone off before its prescribed final destination. Fortunately, we acquired the help of a really friendly French couple who helped us get into the city. So, after this comedy of errors, we eventually arrived at our hostel just after midnight and exhausted. But at least we were there.

It took us nearly two days to get to grips with being in a big city again where we needed to use public transport to get around. We stayed in a hostel in Montemarte, which is on the right bank and in the north of the city. There weren't many hostels available by the time we had decided to stop over in Paris and this was one of the only areas that we could get a place in. The area was actually quite nice and is an attraction in itself - its most famous for housing Moulin Rouge - but if we were to do Paris over, we'd recommend staying on the left bank and closer to the Eifel Tower.

There is so much to see and do in Paris, that if you don't plan before hand you'll probably land up spending half your time there deciding where to go or arguing why you should go to one place over another. Alternatively, you can take the Mlungu Trek approach to the city and get on a hop-on-hop-off bus for a quick full afternoon ride around most of the city to see all the main attractions. Then you can tick off the real biggies by going to the Eifel Tower and the Louvre. Don't go up the tower cause there is no way to skip the two hour queue but do see it during the day and at night when they switch on the sparkly lights (every hour on the hour and for about five minutes). Do go to the Louvre cause you can skip the long queue to get in by using the much lesser known Carrousel du Louvre side entrance - just ask a security guard where it is. (Don't tell anyone but sacrilegiously, we only went to see the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo and skipped on the rest of the museum.) Once you've done these two big boys, you can take a walk from the Eifel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe and a walk down the Champs Elysees. That's the ,main attractions done in one afternoon and evening.

With these out the way, we could focus the rest of our stay on chilling and just taking in being in this cool city. Coffee, baguettes, escargots, restaurants, wine and bars. Walking along the Seine river. Relaxing in Luxembourg Gardens. You really need to experience these parts of the city to realize why it's a great place. The only downsides to the city are its lack of English (we found the lack of English sign posting to be worse than the old story of the people refusing to speak English, which wasn't as common as we expected) and the multiple street intersections (which can take you off path and in the wrong direction if you not fully concentrating). Interestingly, though, we didn't find the city to be as exorbitantly expensive as we expected, except for the accommodation - even looking back now after being to a few more cities that we haven't written about yet, this is still the case.

The city gave us a brief experience of the Parisian lifestyle and although it took half our stay to get into it we left feeling like we could spend another couple of days there.

Trek on…Brett and Darren