Vern: Singapore is incredibly cosmopolitan and our 8-bed dorm reflected that. We shared the room with an Indian, a Malaysian, a Thai and some others, and I battled to understand any of them. So there was a lot of smiling and nodding and, "Alright if I turn off the light? Thumbs down for no." The city-state is famed for its rules and cleanliness. For banning chewing-gum and for issuing large fines for jaywalking and other offences which would elsewhere in the wor...

Andrea: The next day we had to relocate hostels (another by-product of the Qantas strike). Our new hostel was actually on Hong Kong Island in a neighborhood called Causeway Bay. So now we were on the side where all the action was happening, but the views of the harbor weren't as spectacular.We wanted to try dim sum for breakfast since we read it was very typical in HK. We stood in the middle of the sidewalk gazing upwards like tourists hoping a good restaurant wo...

Andrea: We jumped off the bus from the airport in Mong Kok and were greeted by a wall of neon. Everywhere. And people. The rest of the night is a blur (of advertisements). Apparently Mong Kok is one of the most densly populated places on the planet and I am not going to argue with that! We had very detailed directions to the hostel until it said it was 'between the two mobile phone shops.' We got to where the building should have been and looked to the left. Mobi...

Vern: Sydney was exactly the gleaming buzzing beachside metropolis we were expecting, although it was drizzling a bit when we bussed in and the Opera House isn't quite as brilliant when the sun isn't bouncing of its millions of tiles. Public transit was straightforward and we spilled out under an enormous Coke sign into "seedy, dodgy" Kings Cross where we found our hostel. Here we realised that Australians no nothing of "seedy" or "dodgy". The Kings Cross hostels...

Vern: We were delighted to find that our accommodation in laid back Coolangatta was effectively a hotel. A for-surfers-by-surfers beach retreat with a wood panelled bar and pool area littered with beanbags and day-beds. The building had room types for all budgets: apartments, hotel suites and dorms. Naturally we were in an 8-bed dorm, but we had the whole room to ourselves. Result! Over two days we walked several kilometres in either direction along the beach, b...