We departed from the height of civilisation in London,flew 3.5 hours south, and arrived in Africa. As always, our Eastjet flight was an experience. Frenzied fellow travellers urgently trying to secure their "rightful" share of overhead locker space and a desirable seat on the plane. Dale and I avoided the first crushing scramble and managed to find seats together halfway down the plane. After the rigid security at Gatwick airport, stepping off the plane onto th...

Wide awake at 3am, our day got off to an early start. By 8am we had checked our emails, read the paper, consumed a full English breakfast plus two cups of coffee, and set off in search of a laundrette so that when we depart for Morocco tomorrow we have a suitcase of clean clothes. The laundrette was a 10 minute walk away, but there was plenty of interesting things to see en route (the hard-sell from the day before continues...) including the house where Mozart...

Dale and I touched down at London Heathrow at 12:52pm on Thursday 17 May 2012. To get there, we had travelled from Auckland to Sydney (around 3 hours), Sydney to Abu Dhabi (15 hours), and Abu Dhabi to London (7 hours). Despite stopovers in Sydney (5 days so that Dale could attend an orthodontics course) and Abu Dhabi (2 days), we were red-eyed and weary when we ambled off the plain towards customs. By the time we were seated on the tube and rocketing along the...