13/10/11 - 20/10/11 The train pulls in half an hour late and we hastily clamber aboard still fuming at having to pay for new tickets. We stumble through with our bags and locate our....BEDS! On a train?!? The carriage was lined with bunk bed style cubby holes, with a couple of leather straps to stop you from falling out (not to strap you in though..) and a curtain to protect your privacy. We awoke the next morning in our seperate bunks feeling that the whole t...

Sadly today,the netbook which we have been diligently carrying around thus far has died a death. I hope we can revive it soon, but in the meantime we are without a means to regularly work on our blog entries! I know we are severely lagging behind anyway, but now it could be even slower in being updated.....sorry! Will keep you posted! We're in Cambodia now, having crossed the border yesterday Thurs 17 Nov and arrived in Phnom Penh (the capital) around 8pm. For...

KANCHANABURI TO NAKHON PATHOM Day 1 - Markets, Museums A minibus picks us up later than scheduled and drives through the streets of Bangkok until we reach the outskirts where we travel through waterlogged roads to reach the 'Damnoensaduak' floating market, which these days is just for us tourists. The torrential rain from the morning has been replaced by scorching sun by the time we reach the canals of floating shops and narrow boats selling various tourist tat...

We landed in Bangkok at 7pm local time, just barely making it off the plane before we were greeted by a wall of heat. Heavy, clammy heat - completely unlike the fresh rays of the sun that beamed on us through much of South America, this was an in your face, humidity factor HIGH, even-when-the-sun's-gone-down, oppressive heat. It represented the beginning of a very different chapter in our travels. We hopped in a taxi and steamed straight to our hostel (with ...

Family in Far Away Places For the next leg of the journey I'm afraid I must wrench the blog out from under Dean's elegant touch and regale you instead with some stories in my own peasant style, as over the next 3 weeks we had the privilege of staying with some of my family, so it's only right that I should get to gush about them a bit at this point. I think Dean left us touching down in Auckland. Well, to give a little background ... there was a time when I wa...