After Komodo we snuck in a few cheeky days of luxury in Sanur, back in Wirasana hotel with the swimming pool and breakfasts on the balcony, so we could organise the next leg of the trip. And this next leg took us to Java, just in time for the start of Ramadan, and more calls to prayer than one island ever needs. The trip to see the still-smoking volcano at Mount Bromo was the first time we got properly ripped off (or at least were aware of being ripped off as it...

Despite having to wait around on Gili for this trip to leave (a real hardship), the Komodo island trip was definitely the best thing we've done so far, and I'm writing this two weeks on. Once we got back, we heard tales of less-than-seaworthy boats and rubbish crews but luckily our trip couldn't have been much further from these stories. We got on the boat in Lombok, with absolutely no idea what to expect from it - whether there would be beds, what the food woul...

So the two nights we originally planned to spend on Gili T soon became a full 6 nights - turns out it's a really hard island to leave! In our defense, we did plan to leave earlier, but found ourselves at the mercy of the Komodo island trip we'd booked, which didn't leave until Thursday 29th.... Life really is tough when you're stuck on an island as beautiful as Gili with nothing to do but sit on the beach, swim in the beautiful turquoise seas, watch films under t...

There's a reason Bali attracts over 80% of Indonesia's tourists - we spent about 10 days trying to come up with reasons to forget about the rest of the trip and just stay put. We started in the sleepy seaside resort Sanur, appropriately nicknamed 'Snore', reluctant to leave the plush hotel we'd made our home (complete with breakfast on the balcony overlooking the pool, for a grand total of GBP4/night), and used it as a base to explore a bit more of the island. A...

"A flattened anthill" I've been reading Paul Theroux's 'The Great Railway Bazaar' and his description of Bangkok as a flattened anthill is right on the mark - just one day's intensive walking around the city was enough to give that exact impression. That's not to say that I didn't like it - there's lots to like, especially the constantly surprising contradictions - but it's definitely not a city in which I could spend a long time. We made the uninform...