it's a long way from whitley bay...

Final round up

sarahandphil — Mon, 1 Sep 2008 14:05:00 GMT

It's Whitley Bay!!

Well, we don't know if anyone's still reading this - seeing as we're back in the real world now! But seeing as we promised a final round up, and seeing as Sarah is now unemployed and needs diversions to keep her from Jeremy Kyle-induced madness... (did we say American TV was bad?!) here is a compilation of some of our favourite, and a few not-so-favourite (!)things from around the world that we wrote up on the plane home.

We hope you find them interesting, and maybe even find some inspiration in there! We also really hope you've enjoyed hearing about our travellers tales, traumas and general tittle tattle over the past ten months, and would like to thank everyone once again for reading, and especially for all of the messages we've received which kept us smiling, even when our chips (or, more typically, the Internet connection!) were down.

So, with lots of love, and wishing you many happy adventures of your own, it's bye bye from us (for now!)

Sarah and Phil x x

Phil’s answers	Sarah’s answers

Countries

#1 New Zealand	Joint #1 New Zealand / USA / Thailand / Japan
#2 Japan	Joint #1 New Zealand / USA / Thailand / Japan
#3 China	Joint #2 China, Laos

Cities

#1 St. Petersburg	#1 New York, New York!
#2 Luang Prabang, Laos - the whole city is UNESCO listed and we can see why	#2 Buenos Aires - shopping, tango and eating 'til the early hours - all at bargain prices - heaven!
#3 Buenos Aires / New York	#3 Sydney - it's pretty hard to beat this setting - just avoid the cockatoos!
and the booby prize goes to… Delhi / Moscow	and the booby prize goes to… Wuhan, China - they're throwing concrete around at scary rates here. Get some trees!

Sights

Joint #1 the Iguazu falls / all of New Zealand	Joint #1 Pushkar camel fair / the Iguazu falls
#2 the Grand Canyon	#2 Lake Tekapo, NZ - the most amazing blue I've ever seen, and incredibly silent
#3 the Atacama desert, around San Pedro	#3 monks collecting their alms at sunrise, Luang Prabang



Animals

#1 Cheeky thieving monkeys, Delhi	#1 Giant pandas, Chengdu
#2 Tahi the one-legged Kiwi, Wellington	#2 Koalas, Brisbane
#3 Pandas, Chengdu	#3 Sea Lions, NZ
and the booby prize goes to… pesky mosquitos, especially the one that bit Sarah on the eye

	birds

	#1 Tahi the one-legged Kiwi
	#2 Black cockatoo that liked talking to me, Australia
	#3 Yellow-eyed penguins

Meals

#1 Steak / Chicken / Chorizo brochettes, Santiago	#1 Doyles fish restaurant with Mum and Dad B, Sydney
#2 Steak, with red wine, Buenos Aires	#2 Camarou Muqueque, Salvador
#3 Mushroom curry, Delhi	#3 Churrascaria buffet with dancing, Foz de Iguacu
and the booby prize goes to… a pot of Pea Yoghurt, Beijing	and the booby prize goes to… chips with mash, Buenos Aires

Food discoveries

#1 Laos coffee	#1 chocolate brownies – a lifesaver in China, and a treat pretty much anywhere and everywhere!
#2 Bundabergs drinks, New Zealand	#2 Sticky rice – with anything – sushi in Japan, mangos in Thailand, hot curry in Laos…
#3 Beerlao	#3 Lao coffee
(aren’t these all drinks Phil? – Ed)	and the booby prize goes to… fried pork fat, Chengdu
and the booby prize goes to… live, shell-less turtles in Chinese supermarkets

Journeys

#1 Tubing, Vang Vieng	#1 Any of our long, lazy Southeast Asian boat adventures – down the Yangtze or Mekong rivers, or sailing around Halong Bay on a junk in Vietnam
#2 Elephant trekking, Chiang Mai	#2 Driving Route 66, USA
#3 Yangtze river cruise, China	#3 Tongariro crossing, NZ
and the booby prize goes to… sharing the Moscow – St. Petersburg sleeper train with a Class A psycho Uzbekistani	and the booby prize goes to… our mad dash to, and around, the train station, Mumbai

Sports events

#1 Thai Boxing	#1 Musical chairs at Pushkar
#2 Kabbadi, Pushkar	#2 Baseball, San Francisco
#3 Aussie rules, Melbourne	#3 Aussie rules, Melbourne
and the booby prize goes to… competitive car horn beeping in India	and the booby prize goes to… kayaking in Thailand – hopefully we’ll get our timing more together in time for the first dance at our wedding, otherwise there could well be early marital dischord, if not injuries!

Nights out

#1 Baked potato, baked beans and champagne in our camper van in NZ, after we got engaged	#1 San Pedro de Atacama – around the fire looking at the stars…
#2 Sydney Opera House	#2 Sydney Opera House
#3 Las Vegas	#3 Las Vegas / Shanghai acrobats
and the booby prize goes to… driving round LAX for two hours looking for a motel	and the booby prize goes to… the boneshaker Chinese night bus on which I got 1 hour sleep, during which my camera and i-pod were stolen L

Essential things to pack

#1 mosquito repellent	#1 books
#2 good books	#2 silk sleeping bag liner
#3 pants	#3 scrabble

Things we missed (other than friends and family, who of course were always number 1!)

#1 Sunday roasts	#1 Having a proper Sunday
#2 Breakfast on Stoke Newington Church St	#2 Cooking (NB: I might retract this at a later stage)
#3 Sky Sports	#3 My i-pod (see above!)
and the booby prize goes to… work!	and the booby prize goes to… cigarettes (very proud to be a non-smoker since Jan 1^st though!)

Books read

#1 Wild Swans, Jung Chang	#1 Zorro, Isabelle Allende
#2 The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bilgakov	#2 The Corrections, Jonathon Franzen
#3 The Damage Done, Warren Fellows	#3 The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson
and the booby prize goes to… How the Mind Works = How the Mind Hurts!	and the booby prize goes to… Touching the Void, Joe Simpson (just a bit on the scary side when about to go up a mountain!)

Cities to live in

#1 Auckland	#1 Auckland
#2 San Francisco	#2 Vancouver
#3 New York	#3 San Francisco
and the booby prize goes to… Mumbai - we'd last 5 minutes!

Hotels

#1 Ryokan Kangetsu, Tokyo	#1 NZ camper van
#2 Barra Guesthouse, Salvador	#2 Ryokan Kangetsu, Tokyo
#3 Hostel Tanguera, San Telmo, Buenos Aires	#3 Hostel Tanguera, San Telmo, Buenos Aires

Bargains

#1 £3 /night hotel, Khao San Road, Bangkok	#1 Parks – always a nice, free way to chill out in a city. And often come with ice creams, animals or some kind, audience participation opportunities…
#2 Argentina	#2 Buenos Aires (steak, wine, shoes the zoo, and underwear particularly!)
#3 20p Pad Thai, Bangkok	#3 Chanel eyeliner – one pencil got me all the way around the world without fading into the background in all our photos– thanks Orange folks!)
#4 1st class cabin, Yangtze cruise - well worth it to escape the kara-jokey	#4 free refills in the USA

Experiences

#1 Getting engaged!	#1 Tubing, Vang Vieng, Laos
#2 Walking (some of!) the Great Wall	#2 Elephant trek, Thailand
#3 Driving across the USA	#3 Sandboarding, Chile
	#4 Getting into the whole spa and massage thing – in Budapest, Japan and SE Asia...
and the booby prize goes to… being Mad Freddy’s assistants in Santiago. Still makes us blush!
Museums

#1 Hermitage, St. Petersburg	#1 Hermitage, St. Petersburg
#2 Te Pa Pa, Wellington	#2 MOMA, New York
#3 Hanoi ‘Hilton’	#3 Monterey Bay Aquarium, California
	#4 Pre-Columbian Art, Santiago
	#5 Lincoln Experience, Illinois

We have loads more recommendations too, and copious notes that it would be lovely to think were worth taking -so if anyone is interested, ever, just ask!

Big Sur, Boston & back home!

sarahandphil — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:16:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

That's it! After 9 months, 16 countries, 17 flights, 12 train journeys, umpteen bumpy bus rides and nearly 12,000 miles by car and van, we've made it round the world and back. And after all that, the weather in Britain is still rubbish.

We tried to bring some sunshine home with us but apparently it contravened some customs rule about importing strange and unusual foreign goods.

We arrived back in London on Monday evening having finished our US road trip in Los Angeles and spending 3 final days of sunshine in Boston.

Though the weather wasn't sunny all the way, as the fog that enveloped San Francisco Bay decided to accompany us all the way down Big Sur and only lifted when we started to head inland about 100 miles from LA.

Big Fog

Big Sur is a 90 mile stretch of rugged and (apparently) incredibly scenic road that hugs the coastline between Monterey and San Luis Obispo in central California. Unfortunately northern and central California has a weird climate that makes the coast about 10 degrees (celsius) colder than just a couple of miles inland and often leaves the coast shrouded in thick fog.

We delayed our journey down the coast by a day, hoping that the fog might lift and, though it didn't, it gave us time to spend Tuesday afternoon at the Monterey Aquarium which was really good.

Apparently it's one of the best aquariums in the world and it's not hard to see why. There's a seal colony on the beach right next to it and inside they've got sharks, hammerheads, crazy coloured jellyfish and, slightly strangely, otters. They've also got pools where you can touch bat rays (they look like stingrays but had had their stings removed for obvious reasons) and other sea creatures. There's even an outdoor pool where kids under 13 can go scuba diving with instructors.

Elephant seals. You wouldn't want to meet these lot in a beach volleyball match!

We didn't quite look young enough for the scuba diving though this travelling lark must have helped roll back the years a bit as we've been asked for ID nearly each time we've tried to buy a beer. That's not entirely surprising for Sarah as shops and restaurants are meant to ask for ID if you look under 30 but Phil will be 34 in a few months and isn't sure whether he should be pleased or insulted at these requests. Especially confusing was the reaction of a shopkeeper outside Monterey who, when presented with Phil's passport, said "Oh 1974, that's really old, I thought you looked young!" Er, thanks Mr Shopkeeper.

Wednesday was Big Sur day and though the fog did get in the way a bit, we could still get a feel for how beautiful that bit of coast line is. Maybe we'll just have to come back and do it again one day when it's sunnier! We can't really complain though as we reckon we've been very lucky with the weather on the whole trip. We've barely had a bad day and nothing that's really hampered our plans.

One bit of Big Sur that we did spot through the fog...

...and some bits that we didn't!

We then drove through Malibu and Santa Monica on our way into Los Angeles and saw a beautiful sunset across the Pacific and then looked for somewhere to stay. We were still looking 2 hours later...

Sarah in Santa Monica and Malibu sunset

At first we thought we'd try Santa Monica for a hotel but we missed the turn off and had to do a 30 minute detour back onto the freeway. When we made it back, pretty much everywhere was full but we found a motel on the edge of town which had one room left. "Hurray" we thought. But it cost £120 for the night. "Boo" we thought. So we gave up on Santa Monica and decided to head down the road towards the airport where we were sure we'd find cheap accommodation...

And we thought Heathrow was bad. The area around LAX airport is horrific. It's like a composite of all the bad bits of America in one place. Chaotic roads with drivers tearing around and cutting you up, endless drags lined with neon motels and fast food joints and whatever the American equivalent of hoodies is hanging around each corner. Arriving there at 11pm, it felt like something out of Bladerunner.

After having no luck at any of the chain motels, we eventually found a room at a run down independent further down the romantically named Airport Boulevard. We carried our bags up to our room (past a guy who had his door wide-open, blasting the TV out, while he sand-papered his skateboard with no shirt on) and collapsed into our room and hit the sack.

Luckily we made it through the night without incident and returned our car the next morning so we could catch our flight. We thought we'd need to get a shuttle bus to the airport but a kindly old guy from the rental company offered to drive us to the airport in our car! Legend. We had a great chat with him about Vegas and he told us about all the stars he'd seen there, including Frank Sinatra and Elvis. After that and the free upgrade from the Ford Focus to the Rav4, we're happy to recommend Hertz car rentals to anyone thinking of driving in the US. Assuming it wasn't all a mistake and we get stung with loads of extra charges when we get home that is...

And so to Boston, our final stop. We stayed in a fabulous B&B in the Dorchester area of the city. It was built at the turn of the century by a Bostonian big wig who was apparently a political rival of John F Kennedy's dad. It was a lovely big wooden building with verandas and a huge old fashioned drawing room where we spent the evenings playing pool on the full size table and watching the olympics on the giant TV.

Carruth House - our B&B

Wandering round Boston was a great way to unwind from the road trip. It's a very nice looking city and probably the closest in style to an English city that we've come across. That's probably due to it being one of the earliest places to be settled by the original immigrants from England (it's named after Boston in Lincolnshire where they came from) so wasn't designed on a grid system or with big roads for cars.

We followed the 'Freedom Trail' through the city on Friday and Saturday, which takes you past all the major historical points, mainly to do with how they won independence from Britain. We also spent some time in the parks and had a big meal on Saturday night to mark the end of the trip.

The Old State House - scene of the 'Boston Massacre'

Sunday was mainly spent recovering from said meal, watching the Newcastle-Man Utd game and relaxing in the park before catching our flight home early on Monday morning.

And now we're home! We bet you're all nearly as exhausted as us having read through all these blogs but thanks for sticking with us. We've really enjoyed writing them and it's been a great way to stay in touch with our friends and family even when we've been far from home. We're really looking forward to seeing you all again in person soon!

That's not quite it for the blog though. You don't get away that easy. At some point in the next week or so, we're going to do one more blog entry with our highlights (and a couple of lowlights!) from the whole trip. So if you're after any far flung holiday ideas for 2009, stay tuned...

Love Sarah and Phil x

Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Vancouver, Seattle & San Francisco

sarahandphil — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:07:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Sorry it's been a while - we've been making the most of our last couple of weeks of freedom (arrrgh - mild panic!!) and packing it all in as usual, so there's lots to tell you about again.

After leaving you in Utah last week, we decided to make the most of the National Parks pass that we'd invested in, and spent the next two days touring around the big wilderness areas of the north west - Grand Teton and Yellowstone in Wyoming.

The Teton mountains are part of the Rockies, and were named after members of a French expedition were reminded of erm big bosoms! Blooming French, bringing the tone of our blog down, tch. Makes you wonder how they'd feel if a U.S. party turned up and re-christened the Pyrenees 'lil' dunkin' donuts'...

Sarah by Lake Jenny - and Phil, trying his best to snap his ankle so we might stop a while longer...

The park really was stunningly beautiful and we had a lovely day ambling about, and hopping in and out of the car to have a look at things. For those of you that haven't had the chance to visit U.S. National Parks, they are quite different to ours, and you have to get used to doing things a bit differently. The obvious thing is the scale - so it is great that they have well-thought out scenic roads to give those with little time, like us, a taster of the best bits. And of course there is no Kendal mint cake!

The northern parks are also extremely rich with wildlife, partly to the credit of early management of human use of the parks (though they didn't always go about that in totally the right way, it has at least kept these parts of the 'wild west' properly wild). So even from the car we were able to see bison, elk, antelope, beavers, raccoons and bighorn sheep.

Bison right outside our car window

We did also manage a walk up to 'Inspiration Point', overlooking Lake Jenny - in our flip flops (raising a few eyebrows amongst the better prepared hikers!). It was a lovely walk, passing rivers, waterfalls, and of course the big Tetons themselves.

The following day we drove up to Yellowstone, which is really enormous (the circular route around it is about 100 miles in circumference!) - so it was really a whistle-stop tour, but fantastic to get a glimpse of the main features the park has to offer. And they are features and a half!

Firstly, we had time for a picnic while waiting for the famous Old Faithful geyser to erupt - a full 7 minutes late, so not so faithful to the timetable after all. He must be getting cantankerous in his old age!

The old geezer comes to life (check out the crowd!)

Then on to the spectacular canyon of the Yellowstone river, via more geothermal features, lakes, snakey rivers, stalagmite-filled valleys... There are so many amazing things to see, but time is tight - both yours and ours! - so a small sample of pictures might be a more efficient way of sharing them with you...

Yellowstone sights

We also saw a forest fire which had started to the east of the lake, and looked pretty dramatic as clouds of smoke rose into the sky. They seemed to get it under control pretty quickly though - it seemed pretty much par for the course at this time of year. Apparently though one of the firefighters was attacked by a bear who had been woken from his slumber by the fire and wasn't too happy about it. Scarey!

Fire in the park

One final Yellowstone 'highlight' we must mention though, is that we spotted an Alaska number plate in the car park! Now this might not be the holiday anecdote that has you logging on to lastminute.com in droves, but it was pretty exciting for us because, like the big geeks that we are, we've been playing that long car journey classic 'spot the car plates from all the U.S. states' - and had had Alaska on the 'doubtful' list from the outset. So it was with some excitement that we ticked it off. Hopefully the driver of the car wasn't too perturbed by our pointing and high-fiving as we drove by...

We still have South Carolina to get for the full set - but are hopeful for a spot when we fly back east to Boston for the weekend. Watch this space!

On leaving the park, we had a beautiful drive through Montana, for a long time following the Yellowstone river through 'big sky' country, which looked especially golden and delicious in the fading sunlight. Which proved a distraction too far for Sarah, who got pulled over for a wee little bit of speeding. She got away with a pep talk and a warning from the police officer who must have had a soft spot for English blondes. Phew!

Big sky country in Montana - surely there'll not be any traffic cops round here...

Next day we had a long drive across to Seattle (about 560 miles) - which we took at a slightly more steady pace (at least until we got into the state of Washington, where the warning doesn't count-tee hee!). We got there by 4pm, in time for a coffee (of course) a look around the enormous Pike Place market and Belltown (birthplace of grunge).

From our brief glimpse, Seattle seemed a nice, offbeat sort of a place, where you'd definitely still feel at home in a lumberjack shirt and bleached out mop (as long as you didn't work at that other Seattle institution, Microsoft - we spotted some mini-Gates's on a corporate bus, looking like fully paid up members of the chinos and blazers club!)

Pike Place Market in Seattle and Sarah enjoying a celebratory wine after we finally made it to the west coast!

On Wednesday, we drove up to Vancouver for a day trip. Again we only really had a taster, but it seemed a very attractive, progressive sort of a place with lovely parks, funky modern architecture, and our favourite bit, Granville Island, home to loads of art galleries, shops, bars etc. and colourful floating houses. You can definitely see why Vancouver is so often voted one of the best places in the world to live. Here's proof that you really can't have everything though - there were hardly any tacky fridge magnets to be seen! Poor Vancouver.

Vancouver: nice parks and funky floating houses (in the foreground, the skyscrapers aren't floating...)

We stayed in Olympia, WA that night, so that we were positioned ready to start our drive down the west coast. Olympia was actually a pretty cool place, very studenty and 'alternative', with a proper small town feel, and a real small town centre - unlike so many towns we've passed through which are just one long strip of identikit fast food chains, and drive-thru everything, which make it difficult to tell where the town is (and even more difficult to see any real people).

Whinge over, Olympia was nice, and so was Portland, our lunch stop, and another trendy sort of place with old buildings, vintage clothes shops, live music venues, and other things encouraging 'walk-through' and 'maybe even stop for a while' behaviour.

Seagull - stopping for a while

The next couple of days were spent winding our way down Route 101, the coast road, through Washington, Oregon, and into California. We had a symbolic dipping of the toes in the Pacific in a nice little town called Cannon Beach in Oregon - it being a little on the chilly side for full body dipping (it is about 20 degrees cooler on the coast than inland, rather to our surprise!)

Sea, feet, chilly, brrr.

As we entered northern California we noticed the trees getting bigger and realised we were in Redwood (and Big Foot!) country and we took a side trip down the 50 mile 'Avenue of Giants' through Humboldt Redwoods State Park on Saturday morning to have a closer look. The trees really are massive! Many of them grow to over 90 metres and the tallest is 115. We didn't manage to see that one but we did see the 'Dyerville Giant' which measures 113 metres and is 1600 years old. Though unfortunately its current 'height' is more like 3 metres because it fell in 1991 when a nearby tree collapsed into it. Apparently the Park Ranger was asleep in a nearby cabin at the time and thought he'd heard a train crash!

After coming to terms with the awesome height of the Redwoods, we decided it was time for a closer look, so what better way than to drive through one?! Well they have drive-thru everything elses here (fast food, ATMs - it can only be a matter of time before they invent a drive-thru loo) so why not trees? Here's us driving through the famous Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree in Leggett.

What the phrase "only in America" was designed for

We arrived in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon and were there until Monday evening. When we arrived the Golden Gate bridge was shrouded in fog - as it famously often is, but the city itself looked gorgeous in the sun and we had a brilliant couple of days there.

We hung on by our hats (and arms) riding the famous 'cable cars' (which are really more like trams) up and down hills, so we could explore the different areas around touristy Fisherman's Wharf (back in the fridge magnet game!), North Beach (including Little Italy), Haight Ashbury (where the original flower power kids used to hang out), Pacific Heights (gorgeous houses) and the shops around Union Square.

Hold tight now those hills look steep!

The best shop we've seen on the whole trip (Phil was so excited his hair stood on end)

We also went to a ball game on Sunday! Phil had spotted that the San Francisco Giants were playing the L.A. Dodgers and managed to get tickets online on Saturday night. It was a great game to catch, with packed stands (there is quite a big rivalry between the two California teams) and a great atmosphere as everyone tucked into their hot dogs and frozen lemondade to watch what turned out to be a very tight match, the Home team coming back from 4-3 down to win the match 5-4 in the final inning. We seem to have a knack of seeing this kind of result in far flung places - shame it never seems to work whenever we go to see NUFC...

Rounders...er...sorry Americans, we mean baseball, in San Francisco

So now we're about to make our way down Big Sur to L.A. and then we fly to Boston on Thursday for the final destination of the trip before we fly home on Monday.

It's been fantastic to read everyone's comments and really meant a lot to us and we're glad we seem to have kept you entertained - we were worried we might only have a couple of readers left by this stage, so thanks for sticking with us! We can't wait to see everyone when we get back and it'll make up for the trip being all over!

In the meantime, stay posted for the final blog!

Love Sarah and Phil x

P.S. And don't forget that all our USA and Canada photos are over at http://journals.worldnomads.com/sarahandphilusa

Route 66 (part 2), Grand Canyon, Vegas & Utah

sarahandphil — Sat, 2 Aug 2008 13:20:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We're still on the road and zooming our way through the US with the distance to Los Angeles shrinking faster than Gordon Brown's approval ratings.

We're now in Idaho and not far off the top of our big western loop. In fact we've managed to stick very closely to our original plan and have got through 5,000 miles in two weeks. Fact fans may be interested to know that that's the same distance as London to Beijing. Maybe road trips could become a new Olympic sport?

So, we left you in Elk City, Oklahoma and another 100 miles took us into the Texas 'panhandle' (the sticky-outy bit at the top) where, true to stereotype, we saw lots of cattle and roadkill armadillo. Less expectedly, we also came across 10 cadillacs half-buried into the ground just outside Amarillo...

Pink cadillacs, oozing, erm into, the street

We didn't find Peter Kay or Tony Christie in Amarillo (presumably they still haven't found anyone who knows the way yet) but we did find this inspired bit of advertising at a Burger King right next to a McDonalds...

The local burger joints not on such good terms in Texas then...

We stopped for lunch at 'the Midpoint Cafe' in the tiny town of Adrian, - another fantastically retro place, which marks the halfway point on Route 66 between Chicago and LA (the clue is in the name!).

It's a cafe, at the mid point!

The roast beef, spuds and veg was the first "proper" Sunday lunch we've had on the trip. Thai stir fry and Vietnamese spring rolls just don't quite cut it. We nearly managed it in Argentina but as they haven't discovered vegetables yet, Sunday beef and red wine didn't count...

After lunch we crossed the border into New Mexico and right on cue, the landscape turned a lot more barren and red and generally more desert than farm-like, and the roadkill armadillo stopped, thank goodness. The place names and radio stations all became Spanish too, so the country and western music that had accompanied us for the past few states changed to, er, Coldplay, whose CD we picked up in Toronto. Have you tried listening to Mexican music?!

New Mexico was beautiful though and we stopped off at Santa Fe and Alberquerque. Santa Fe is all adobe buildings and it has the oldest church in the US.

View of the Plaza Santa Fe

Alberquerque is a bigger modern city but the old town is really well preserved with a nice square in the centre. They also have hot dogs, but, sadly, no jumping frogs...

Between the two cities, we also found a little place called Tinkertown. It's a quirky little home-made museum, stuck in the middle of nowhere, and full of what seems like millions of miniature towns and people that were crafted out of scrap and things found by a husband and wife over 40 years. If not to everyone's taste, it was pretty amazing, and quite inspiring to see what they'd created just in their spare time. A plaque near the entrance sums it up brilliantly: "We did all this while you were watching TV!"

One of the exhibits in Tinkertown - a tiny circus (and why not?!)

After New Mexico we crossed into Arizona and stayed in Flagstaff before heading to the Grand Canyon the next day. There's not much we can say that the pictures can't do better but the Canyon was of course fantastic. The scale of it is just incredible and the different coloured layers of rock, some of which are billions of years old, make it a truly awesome sight.

The Grandest of Canyons

After leaving the Grand Canyon, we hit Route 66 again for the last time. We left it in Nevada, just 250 miles short of LA so we could head north to the bright lights of Las Vegas.

Bye bye Route 66, hello Las Vegas!!

We knew Vegas was pretty much in the middle of the desert but we were a bit concerned as we watched the temperature gauge steadily creep up as we approached, despite it being late evening. By the time we pulled onto the (in)famous Strip (where all the casinos are) and parked up at our hotel, it was gone 11pm and the temperature was 100 farenheit - about 36 Celsius. We couldn't believe it, so in case you don't either, here's the proof!

We only had two nights in Vegas and had to make the most of them so we checked in and promptly went a-gambling and a-drinking till gone 3am. Perhaps the a-drinking wasn't such a-good-idea though, as having steadily turned his 20 dollars into 100 on the roulette wheel, Phil started to think he was George Clooney and went all in on black and lost the lot on the last spin of the wheel!

Oh well, if you can't lose your shirt in Vegas where can you? Luckily we won it all back the following evening and this time tucked the winnings safely away before temptation (or booze) could get the better of us.

Leaving Las Vegas - with some money!

We were staying in the Flamingo hotel right in the middle of the Strip, opposite Caesar's Palace (where Elton John was playing that evening) and just along from the Bellagio (which was the casino in Ocean's Eleven) and the Venetian (which has to be seen to be believed).

The Flamingo, and comparing sunglasses with Elton

The Venetian was until fairly recently the largest hotel in the world and features a replica of Venice's Rialto bridge (to scale!) and has a canal running through it with gondoliers offering rides on genuine Venetian gondolas. Unbelievable. Vegas may well be the most over-the-top, ridiculous place in the world but it's hard not to be impressed.

Real gondolas in not-so-real 'Venice'

Our hotel was a little more normal (at least by Vegas standards) though it still had live flamingos in an area near the pool. A pool which came in very handy on Wednesday afternoon when the temperature peaked at 42 degrees!

On Thursday we left Vegas and headed to Utah, with a detour to the Hoover Dam. The dam is on the Colorado River and provides all the power for Las Vegas with enough left over to power another million homes. That's quite an achievement considering Vegas must have more neon lights than there are grains of sand in the desert. And almost as many air conditioned hotel rooms.

The Hoover Dam - with all those neon lights to power, how does it ever get the vacuuming done?!

Utah was really fantastic. We visited three national parks: Zion, Arches and Canyonland. They were all great with incredible scenery and massive rock formations. Zion was very beautiful, with pink, red and white formations, and the arches in, well, Arches were really picturesque.

Zion National Park

Arches national Park

But Canyonlands was the most awe-inspiring. It's absolutely vast and the red rock canyons are like nothing we've ever seen. Apparently it has some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet and we can believe it. It looks like Mars and if you had some better walking shoes, and better heat tolerance than we did, you could happily spend weeks just exploring.

In Canyonlands National Park (not the Grand Canyon - just a normal one apparently!)

Today we've driven north through Utah and into Idaho, via Salt Lake City. We had a quick paddle in the lake, but it's not somewhere you'd probably want to spend too much time in. The lake is surrounded by sulphurous smelling flats and the rim is covered in millions of tiny tickly flies. It was nice to look at, but a little bit eerie. A bit like the city itself.

The salt lake

We parked in the centre of Salt Lake but there were no shops, just lots of offices, conference centres and churches belonging to the Mormons. There seemed to be about 20 different newlyweds having their wedding photos taken but no one else was around. We walked into a big food court which had just two other people in it, so we left. Maybe we should have come on a week day or we were in the wrong part of town but it felt a little like wandering into the twilight zone.

The state building, Salt Lake City and could this be the only shopping mall in America that is empty on Saturday??

So we scarpered to Idaho. Which is famous for....drum roll....potatoes. Exciting eh? Idaho's nickname is The Spud State. They're very proud of their tattie heritage, so much so that they even have a spud museum. Really...

We're spending tonight in Idaho Falls and plan to spend the next two days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone parks. After that we're heading to Seattle and hopefully we'll fit in a day trip to Vancouver. Then it's a drive all the way down the west coast to LA via San Francisco.

Just before we go, a quick word on American television: Aaagghh! Just had to get that off our chests!

Take care everyone,

Love Sarah and Phil x x

Toronto, Chicago and Route 66 (part 1)

sarahandphil — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:03:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We've clocked up 3000 miles now on our road trip across the states, and have just seen a sign for Miami out of the window... hang on a minute, didn't we tell everyone we were following the pioneers and heading out west?

Actually we are still on track and it's Miami, Oklahoma we've just passed... phew! They have a habit of doing that around here. We've almost lost track of the number of Springfields we've driven through (and not a single one inhabited by yellow cartoon characters either;). But yes, we have made it pretty much to the half way point already after a busy few days on the road...

We spent our last night in Canada having a delicious meal at the top of the CN Tower in Toronto, which has amazing views as you'd expect, but to our surprise, was made particularly memorable by a huge thunderstorm, which we got to see close up at 400 metres above ground, and from every angle as the restaurant revolved through 360 degrees. Not recommended for the faint-hearted!

The view up - and down - from the scary CN Tower

We really liked Toronto though - it has funky shopping areas a-plenty, loads going on in terms of music, art, film etc. Plus the great lakes are right on the door step (or stoop as they'd have it round here). The people that live here all looked sort of wholesome, but fashionable and are obviously pretty clever to live somewhere so nice but cheap too. Irritating really.

The new extension to the Royal Ontario Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind (who also has the commission for the new World Tade Centre site in NY)

The Toronto-ites have also managed to pick up on some of the best things about US restaurants (friendly waitresses, free coffee refills, fresh ingredients) whilst having the good sense to leave the '6 free donuts with every side salad' - mentality to their southern neighbours. No drive-thru gyms for these guys!

We made some progress back towards donut-land that night (sorry - we'll stop all this rudeness soon!) - and stayed in a town called Hammond, just south of Lake Michigan, then made an early start next morning as we were headed all the way to not so windy, but hot and sunny city, Chicago.

This actually was a slight change of plan from the original, which had us headed in a big northern loop round the lakes and via the Upper Michigan peninsular. We were put off doing this by the Michigan slogan though - "if it is a beautiful peninsular you seek, look around you"... For goodness sake. We were also slightly put off by the fact that it would have meant a 500 mile detour with no time to stop to appreciate the beauty of said peninsular. Which we are sure you will agree, would have been a great shame!

The more direct route to Chicago took us fairly quickly through
Michigan, skirting around Detroit (apparently they build a lot of
cars there so they can get out quick...), and on into Indiana. The scenery is really quite pleasant here, with giant fields of corn
looking for all the world like the home of the jolly green giant and purty white clapboard houses all along the road - mostly draped in stars and stripes and with an old boy catching some shade out on the verandah. All very picturesque.

There are also some of the largest Amish communities anywhere in this
part of Indiana, and sure enough we saw lots of people in horse drawn
carts, dressed in traditional clothing and just going about their
business, trying not to get run over by the giant trucks (or Rav 4s!)
steaming through on their way out west.

Amish folk - Shipshewana, Indiana (photos taken with paparazzi-like subtlety out of the car window...)

We stopped off in a couple of the villages to have a look around - and had a delicious cherry (Sarah) and banana cream (phil) pie in a lovely Amish-run place in Middlebury. Just in the interests of cultural enlightenment you understand...

We stayed just outside of Chicago that night, in a cheap motel next to a Best Western - so we could go to their restaurant and borrow their wifi for free tee hee!

We then had a full day in Chicago on Thursday. Its a really nice city with some amazing architecture - new and old - and, coming as a surprise to us, several beaches.

Some things we saw in Chicago

Chicago is located on the edge of Lake Michigan, and the residents know how to make the most of it - they have created beaches which spread out to the east of the city - and they were chock full of sunbathers, people playing volleyball or just hanging out at beach side bars.

One of Chicago's lovely beaches - a bit of a different atmos these days to the gritty world of Al Capone!

We walked the whole stretch, stopping for ice cream despite it apparently being 'Christmas in July' (?) and to jump out of the way of people learning to ride 'segways' - which are rather awkward looking two-wheeler motorised buggy type things that seem to be flavour of the month round here.

Get a calendar (and a bike) we say

Leaving Chicago on Friday meant making like Jack Kerouac and joining route 66 - which will take us all of the way through the Great Plains, the mid-west, and eventually to sin city itself. No, not Watford, Las Vegas...

Our first day on the 'mother road' went pretty much to plan. We drove about 1/3 of it, mostly on freeways that have been laid over the original brick road, though there are also still some original sections to follow, varying from Devon-ish single-lane dirt tracks to dusty two lane highways. And they didnt even have su doku to kill time!

No wonder so many great inventions have come out of this country. If it weren't for all those long car journeys maybe they'd never have got around to dreaming up drive through ATM machines, buckaroo, or space hoppers... we were grateful for the invention of air con anyway - it's been hitting 100 degrees most days - and that we could make steady progress on the surprisingly empty freeway sections.

This made time for diversions on to the old sections of road and for stops to see various original landmarks - there are some great old gas stations, neon signs and billboards and after a few stops at some real old skool diners, we were beginning to feel just like extras in 'Happy Days'. Its just a shame that Phil left his 'the Fonz' jacket behind in Japan, there surely would have been waitresses on roller skates flocking in no time!

English visitors still seem to be rare enough to raise a few
eyebrows in these parts, and we were a bit of a conversation point
on a few occasions (you're driving how far??).

For example, in Litchfield , IL, we got chatting to a farmer who was on a trip with his sons to buy a new boat trailer. He didn't actually seem to believe that we had really come all of the way from London and asked us a few questions, perhaps by way of a test...

"so you don't have too many farms in England then?"

(no, not many in London but there are some left elsewhere..)
"no corn 'n' no beans huh. That's something ain't it"

(well we mostly go to the supermarket but we might try and develop our 3
square feet of land into a herb / aromatherapy garden when we get
home...)
"uhuh. How much does a five bedroom house cost in London these days then?"

(wild guess - a million dollars - we don't know either)

"you folks must be totally outta your minds!! Well you enjoy your
trip now and come by our farm of you wanna place to stay a few days..."

Maybe he had a point...

One other interesting stop was in Springfield, Illinois, which was where
Abraham Lincoln spent his early years. As well as his childhood
home, lawyers office, favourite laundrette blah blah blah, you can
also visit an excellent new museum all about his life, the abolition
of slavery, and the civil war.

It was put together extremely well, with some really interesting
original articles (like the actual Gettysburg address), plus more
high tech stuff like a white house reconstruction and a modern-day
style newscast of what his election campaign might have looked like
if it were today. Well worthwhile stopping by for a couple of hours.
Even if our budget is now in serious jeopardy as a result of the
gift shop's collection of fridge magnets and Abe-style beards
tempted us into a few purchases...

Hmmm

In the afternoon we made another stop at a place called Cahakia, on the outskirts of St. Louis. Here they have discovered the site of the largest ancient civilisation north of Mexico - at one time home to 20,000 people! It had suburbs and everything. All that's left today though are
some earthen mounds and a museum, so you have to use your imagination a
bit but again, it was really well done, and it was good to reflect a while on how much change this part of the world has seen.

The site of the ancient city of Cahakia now, and how it might have once looked

You also get a good view of St. Louis's giant gateway from the top
of the main mound...

This might be the best way to see St. Louis, which by all accounts is one badass place closer up, pretty impoverished and with big crime problems. It is also apparently so polluted that its river caught fire! And we thought London was bad... We made a speedy exit anyway, and got back on the road for Springfield (this one in Missouri - keep up!) for the night.

We stayed in a brilliant motel (the Rail Inn) which had been fully
restored to its 50s glory, and was also just up the road from an
original Steak 'n' Shake diner, where Sarah had a steak and a shake
(of course) and Phil had a salad... hopefully we'll not be arrested
for this most strange and out of town-like behaviour!

The Rail Inn

Shake

Day 2 on route 66 took us another 450 miles, out of Missouri, briefly
through Kansas (just missed the Wizard of Oz tornados thankfully) and across most of Oklahoma. We put in more driving hours on slightly older roads (about 9 1/2 hrs total) and stopped a little less.

The view out of the window shifted gradually as we headed further south west, and there are fewer fields of corn, more fields with cows, and there seems to be a greater variety of housing - some richer, some much poorer.

You also of course notice more country music on the radio, and more
'God is your true friend, so repent or else he gonna getcha' - type messages start to provide variation from the endless gas prices debates...

Possibly our favourite sign so far: 'What would Jesus eat?' (a tasty mixed grill at 'The Crossing' apparently...)

We did have time to stop for a sneaky peaky at Carthage, a nice old-fashioned Missouri town with a fancy courthouse, and, slightly incongruously, a British vintage car rally going on.

We also stopped in Tulsa, where it really was very, very hot - to the
point where there was no - one really around, and many of the shop's
had shut, despite it being Saturday afternoon. We actually saw tumbleweed drifting about! The quietness meant we could stick our feet in the nice street fountains in peace, and cool off before leaving for Elk City, Oklahoma, where we spent saturday night.

No elk sightings to report, but plenty of cheap cow on offer at the local eatery. Phil has also now given up on the healthy eating 'plan' and we both tucked into beef tacos before hitting the sack in preparation for making our way to the wild wild west...

However, this entry has now gone on for almost as long as route 66 itself, so we'll let you get on with something more useful now and tell y'all about that in our next entry...

Thanks for sticking with us everybody - only a few more of these to go now!

Lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

Montreal, Ottawa & Niagara Falls

sarahandphil — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:07:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Since picking up our car on Friday we've managed to cover about 1,000 miles and spent 18 hours on the road buzzing around Canada's big cities and Niagara.

We picked up the car on Friday night and had planned to head north through New York state and find a motel on the US side of the border before heading across to Montreal the next morning. Unfortunately things didn't go quite to plan.

Just as we pulled off the motorway (sorry freeway) at about 11:30pm to find a motel in Plattsburgh, the last US town before the border, a torrential downpour came out of nowhere. No problem we thought, we'll just drive slowly and find a motel and get some sleep. Not so simple as it turned out. It was a Friday night and half of Canada had decided now would be a good time to visit their neighbours and all 4 of the motels we tried were full and it seemed we weren't likley to find anywhere before Canada.

We pressed on and crossed the border at 10 past midnight on Saturday morning. We drove another 10 miles and eventually found a couple of motels. The first was full but the second had one room left and it took us all of about a millisecond to agree to take it and get some rest.

Luckily the sun came back out on Saturday morning and we had a short drive into Montreal and parked up and found a great cafe for breakfast, serving up huge salmon and cream cheese bagels with free refills of coffee. Suitably refreshed, we strolled through downtown Montreal and towards the old town on the banks of the river.

Breakfast in Montreal

At this point, we should mention that Montreal is in Quebec, which is Canada's French-speaking region. Luckily for us though, our GCSE language skills weren't put to much of a test as everytime we tried to speak to someone in French, they immediately twigged we weren't native speakers / didn't have a clue what we were on about, and replied to us in English. Phew.

The Place Des Armes in Montreal

The city is really nice with a good mix of new buildings and skyscrapers with a lot of preserved old Victorian buildings. We wandered round the old town for a bit and had a cup of coffee and made the obligatory fridge magnet purchase (a furry mooses' head - awesome) before getting the metro to the botanical gardens. Where we spent about 20 minutes before another torrential downpour had us cowering in the rain for the next 20 minutes.

You know, I think it might be raining...

From Montreal, we drove to Montebello where we spent the night. According to Wikipedia: "The village is world famous for the Château Montebello resort, the largest log structure ever built. The resort was the host for the 1983 NATO Nuclear Planning Group, and the 1981 G7 Economic Summit." Wow! Those are some exciting stats aren't they! We did have a look at the Chateau and can confirm it was very nice. Didn't see any world leaders though.

On Sunday we continued westward to Ottawa, Canada's capital city. Apparently Ottawa was chosen as the capital for similar reasons to Canberra in Oz, in that it was a bit of a neutral choice half-way between two big rival cities (Montreal and Toronto in Canada's case). It's quite a small city and centred on the parliament building which looked rather similar to a certain parliament building in London...

Canada's (not Britain's) parliament building

We had lunch in the funky Byward Market and a brief stroll to parliament and down the Rideau Canal before getting back in the car and heading south into the USA again. We must have passed the fabled grilling of quickfire questions from the border guard ("Where ya from?", "How d'ya know each other?", "Where d'ya work?", "You're driving how far?!!" etc.) because she eventually let us pass after 5 minutes and we were back in New York State.

We made our way south and then took a right turn (i.e. west) after we'd passed the eastern shore of Lake Ontario and spent the night in Rochester, about 60 miles east of Niagara. In the morning we visited the Strong Museum which has over 500,000 pieces of assorted Americana but concentrated on toys dating from the 18th century up to the present day. We spent quite a while looking at the section on the 80's which had lots of toys that we'd had as kids. And Phil thrashed Sarah on the Atari racing game too. Get in.

From Rochester we drove along the southern shore of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. We managed to stumble upon a beautiful little town on the banks of the lake where we stopped for an ice cream and a fridge magnet and from where we could see the tops of some Toronto skyscrapers, including the famous CN Tower, which must have been at least 100 miles away across the water, before carrying on to Niagara.

To be honest we were kind of prepared to be underwhelmed by the falls because the guidebooks had said they were often built up to be better than they are in real-life ("the first disappointment of married life for all of those honeymooners" - the big cynics). We thought they were really impressive though - and there's a nice atmosphere about the place with lots of families and kids all excited to be there. Sure the falls themselves are not as vast as Iguazu but they still drop a long way down and the noise and force is huge. Superman certainly had a job on his hands resucing that small boy in the film!

Unlike Iguazu, Phil didn't have to take his pants of this time! Thank the lord.

We had a good look from the American side before crossing back into Canada (with a much briefer borderguard quiz). The view of the Falls is meant to be much better from the Canadian side because they face head onto to the Falls, so obviously the first thing we did was to...er...go to the cinema to see the new Batman film! We went back to the Falls after the film to see them lit up at night though and then went back for a proper day time look this morning.

Da na da na da na da na Batman...

Today (Tuesday) we drove to Toronto and have just had a brief look round so far. We're going to have more of an explore around shortly, before having dinner in the restaurant at the top of the enormous CN Tower tonight.

We've got some serious road action ahead of us after we leave Toronto though because it's the big drive around the north of the Great Lakes before dropping back down into America at the Michigan Peninsula and then onto Chicago.

Love Sarah and Phil x x

***IMPORTANT PHOTO NEWS!***

We've apparently managed to fill the 1500 capacity photo limit that World Nomads allows! So we've created a new journal page to hold all our USA and Canada pictures. So from now on, if you want to see the galleries and all the photos from North America, then you'll need to go to this page: http://journals.worldnomads.com/sarahandphilusa where you'll find the photo galleries listed down the right hand side as usual. We'll still be putting all our stories on the original site though.

New York, New York

sarahandphil — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:45:00 GMT

"Ba ba dah da da da ba ba dah da da da da... start spreading the news...." Yes, we arrived in NY early Tuesday morning and, fuelled up with all that steak and south american coffee, were ready to hit the ground running. Well, walking faster than usual anyway!

Armed with coffee and ready for a big day in the big apple

We had intended to do as much as possible in our 3 1/2 days in NY and seriously went for it, running around ticking off sights and shopping like amphetamine-crazed mad people. Anyone seeing us flying about would have thought we'd never seen a big city before but it was all excellent fun.

We started with a walk up 5th Avenue and a deli breakfast, then picked up a ticket for the city tourist buses, which had been recommended by several friends as a good way to see the main sights - all sitting in the open air.

Outside 'Radio City' - looking too cool to be hot

We thought this was a big bonus seeing as it was extremely hot and sunny, and also gave us the added erm, excitement of having to duck whenever we got close to an overhanging branch or various other obstacles that seem designed to catch out unwitting tourists. Apparently someone was seriously injured just a few weeks ago as a result of standing up to take photos just as one of those hanging yellow traffic lights approached...ouch. They may have cleaned up the crime scene here but this city is still a dangerous place to be!

The buses take various routes around uptown and downtown Manhattan and work on a hop on – hop off basis. We've been on a few of these tourist buses in vairous places on the trip now and have grown to really like them. They're a great way to get orientated and are a bit like big temptresses on wheels, giving you a taster of all the main highlights so that you want to go back for more!

Taxis heading for Grand Central Station

We started on the downtown bus, which took us around the South of Manhattan island. At this point it was about 9am and about 90 degrees. By the time we’d been on the bus an hour it had climbed to well over 100 and our heads were starting to melt. Or so it felt like. So we got off and jumped on a nice breezy cruise around the harbour, over to Ellis island, and to see a statue of some bird with a fancy head-dress...

Some bird...

There’s also an outdoor art installation on at the moment consisting of four large waterfalls positioned at various points around the harbour. It is really quite nice and was a welcome opportunity to get some relief from the heat in the form of spray. Just like the Iguazu falls all over again. Well, sort of...

We then visited an exhibition called ‘Bodies’ which is on at Seaport harbour. Well, to be more accurate, Phil visited the exhibition. Sarah had previously seen Gunther Van Hagens ‘Bodyworks’ exhibition in London, which is based on a similar plastication / dissection technique – and felt rather wobbly about the whole thing, so was happier wandering around the shops. She is however determined to get past the ‘bones’ section of the souvenir book that Phil bought one day when she is feeling strong...

After the boat trip we walked up Wall Street looking for Gordon Gecko but found Pret a Manger – it was a very special moment being reunited with our favourite sandwiches after so many months scraping by without even a bite of cheese and pickle!

We're pretty sure this stock exchange is American....

Next we got back on the bus which took us through the lower East side, and then back to Broadway, where we hoped to pick up some tickets to see Ricky Gervais, but (quelle surprise) he had sold out, so we went to see some local stand up instead. A good move!

We got six acts for our $10, four of which were really very amusing (the other two were slightly upstaged by our giant stack of nachocs, but still not awful). Also quite comedic were some of the audience, who appeared not to take to the sardonic NY style of humour, and pulled some excellent ‘we are from Texas sonny Jim and we NOT amused by your ‘clever’ jokes about southerners’ faces. Thankfully they must have left their AK47s back at the ranch and were happy just to shoot some evil glances and go. A fun evening’s entertainment all round!

Next day we went for some ‘proper’ culture and hit the awesome Metropolitan Museum of Art for most of the morning. Then we chilled out with a salad at the boating lake in Central Park for a couple of hours before carrying on on the bus through Harlem.

On the roof of the Metrolopitan Museum

Sarah with some crazy sculptures on the Met roof

John Lennon memorial, Bethesda fountain, and political badges in Central Park

Evening was spent browsing the shops – especially the (big!) Apple store. The queues were so long though - estimated at 3 hours by one shop assistant – that we decided to go for dinner first, then as the shop is open 24 hours, we went back at midnight to make our purchases – by which time the queue had subsided - yay!

So Sarah is the proud owner of a new iPod touch (like an i-phone without the phone) – a replacement for the one that was stolen in China back in February. In the apparent absence of any internet cafes around here (maybe everyone has Internet at home??), this is currently acting as our main point of Internet access at the moment as it has wifi – but we can't upload pictures with it, hence the un-decorated look of this entry - sorry. Also it is a bit fiddly to use, so apologies to those of you who have received more illiterate than usual emails in the past few days!

Sarah and her new purchases

Back to NY anyway, and Thursday we had another morning of art – MoMA this time – which was also really fantastic. Lots of stuff we recognised, lots more we didn't, and fantastic shops! Then we spent the afternoon looking around Tribeca, SoHo and Greenwich village and doing a spot of shopping.

Now those of you that know NY and know Sarah will appreciate that this afternoon was never going to make for a feature in ‘effective fiancial management magazine' and indeed we came back with a tad more than our usual strict two fridge magnet per city souvenir budget allows for. Oops.

However, we were not spree-ed out yet, and managed yet more shopping in the trendy meatpacking district on Friday morning (well, someone has to give a lift to the faltering US economy don't they?) before catching a train to Stamford, CT, where we picked up our Toyota Rav 4* to begin our loooooooooooooooooooooong road trip to LA.

We made a good start, getting straight on Interstate 87 on Friday afternoon and putting the 350 miles to Canada behind us that evening. We stopped for a realy gorgeous dinner at Lake George in the Airondacks, where some lucky New Yorkers get to hang out on with their boats at the weekend, then overnighted at a Motel on the border ready to visit Montreal yesterday. We’ll have to tell you about that in our next entry – when we’ll also try and get some photos up… in the mean time, we're off to Taco Bell for a cheap dinner!

Love to all,

Sarah and Phil x x

*Bit of a result this since we had booked the much cheaper Ford Focus. We haven’t had to pay any more yet, so are just hoping that no-on tells Hertz…

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***IMPORTANT PHOTO NEWS!***

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The Plan for the USA

sarahandphil — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:39:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We've made it to our 15th and penultimate country of the trip and are currently zooming round New York and trying to see everything in 3 and a half days before we pick up the car on Friday.

We thought that before we hit the road, we'd tell you about the route we're hoping to take so you can follow our progress or see if we get lost and end up in Mexico.

We're planning to drive from Stamford, Connecticut (just outside New York) to Los Angeles (via a bit of Canada) in four weeks. If we follow our intended route, then we'll cover just over 7,000 miles, which is about the same distance (in a straight line) from London to Buenos Aires or London to Singapore!

We worked out that we did just over 3,000 miles in New Zealand, so this is going to be much more of a road trip with less time for sight seeing and we reckon we'll need to drive an average of 4 and a half hours a day. Though no doubt we'll fit in some more of those 7 hour walks along the way somewhere...

If you're wondering why we're starting in Stamford, it's because New York City is just about the most expensive place in America to hire a car from. After a bit of hunting around, we found we could save a quite a bit of cash by jumping on the train for a 50 minute ride into Connecticut and pick up the car there. See, our budget traveller skills are still intact after all this time!

From Stamford we're heading straight up north to Canada (the last country of the trip!) and Montreal. From there, we'll go west to Toronto, via Ottawa, and then down to the Niagara Falls. From Niagara we'll need to re-trace our route back to Toronto before heading west again and drive round the northern side of the Great Lakes before dropping back down into the USA through the upper Michigan Peninsula.

Does anyone know any good car games...?

That will take us to Chicago and the beginning of the famous Route 66. Although it no longer bears that name and has largely been replaced by interstate highways, you can still drive the old route from Chicago to Los Angeles. Route 66 will take us from Chicago through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, which is where we'll come off it so we can visit the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.

...can you recommend any good Hicksville radio stations?

From Vegas, we're hoping to have time to take a great big loop up to the north and the border with Canada, before driving back down the west coast to Los Angeles. The route will take us through Utah and Salt Lake City, Yellowstone Park and up to Glacier National Park in Montana. From there, we'll head west to Seattle and then down the west coast, via San Francisco, with a detour inland for Yosemite National Park.

Though if we run out of time, or lose all our money in a Vegas casino, then we have plan B up our sleeves and can cut the loop short or even just take a left at Vegas, go straight to LA, and save ourselves 3,000 miles (thanks for that suggestion Anna!).

...or have any good knitting patterns we can try out?

Phew! Quite a way to go then! We fly from Los Angeles to Boston on 14th August, so we have exactly four weeks on the road. We've got a few days in Boston for a final fling and a few cups of tea before flying home on the 18th.

So if all goes to plan, and we haven't taken a wrong turn and ended up in Alaska, we'll see you all in a few weeks. By then we'll probably be the size of houses having eaten our body weights in super size everythings with fries and cream on top, so please don't bring your cameras!

Can't wait to see everyone soon, but in the mean time, keep watching out for journal updates, and do let us know if you have any roadtrip tips or suggestions for places we might be passing through (thanks also for those already received!)

Love,

Phil and Sarah x x

Buenos Aires - The Sequel

sarahandphil — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:38:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

This week we're bringing you a tale of tango in San Telmo, partying in a Paddy bar, bling at breakfast and pants in Palermo. Stay with us....

We're also saying goodbye: to Louise and Vanessa and also to South America where we've had 7 great weeks, but which we're leaving on Monday to go to New York.

Let's start with tango. Wednesday night saw us hit El Querandi for a dinner and tango show. We couldn't leave the home of tango without seeing exactly how it's done and the show was great. It was a bit touristy (but then we are tourists!) and the dancing was very impressive - not to mention some of the skimpy outfits, which of course Phil hardly paid any attention to as he concentrated on the footwork and dance techniques.....

The tango band and the audience

Earlier that day we'd gone on a shopping trip to the trendy Palermo district. It's fair to say that clothes shopping with three girls probably wouldn't be top of Phil's list when it comes to best ways to spend an afternoon - one's bad enough! - but Sarah, Louise and Vanessa were quite restrained and restricted themselves to just a few items. And Phil bought two pairs of pants. Which was nice.

Just the two bags...

On Thursday, we headed to the colourful Caminito area of La Boca for a look round and for some art and fridge magnet shopping. La Boca has a bit of a reputation for being, shall we say, a little rough around the edges and our taxi driver recommended that we not stay beyond 5pm and stick to the Caminito area or we might run into some of the friendly neighbourhood muggers. We did as advised and ran into no one more dangerous than a man dressed as a giant red mosquito. As you do. We have no idea what he was doing but he seemed friendly enough.

Mosquito man tries to explain himself

Louise choosing a painting in La Boca

We've also been quite restrained with the booze this week too....until Thursday that is. Sarah and Phil had thought that Louise and Vanessa might want to party, party, party all week but a combination of a touch of the snuffles and the fact it takes several hours to eat dinner thanks to the massive size of the steaks, means that we hadn't had much time for bars. But by Thursday Louise was feeling better and in the mood to get back in touch with her Irish roots. So that evening we went to Buenos Aires' top Irish bar (there's a phrase we bet you never thought you'd read) which goes by the name of Shamrock's.

We nearly didn't make it though because having agreed to meet up at "the Irish bar", we all ended up at the wrong one - who'd have thought Buenos Aires would have two Irish bars?! Phil and Sarah got there first and were just starting to question Time Out magazine's description of it as one of the best bars in the city, when we realised the name of the bar wasn't actually Shamrock's but an Irish bar called, er, Di Matias. Not a typically Irish name, we'll grant you. We were also the only people in the entire place, which was quieter than a sponsored silence in a library. We'd just realised our mistake when Louise and Vanessa arrived. We all "enjoyed" a quick drink before making for the exit.

Shamrock's turned out to be a good deal livelier and the upstairs bar was packed with a young after work crowd and students. We got chatting to some of the locals who told us this was the place to be seen on a Thursday night and that they'd be here till the early hours before getting up for work at 7am the next day. Which led us to conclude that either Buenos Aireans have incredible stamina or we'd just discovered the reason why their economy had been ailing for the past decade.....

Cheers!

Phil and Sarah stayed upstairs chatting while Louise and Vanessa decided to hit the dancefloor downstairs. The photographic evidence from Louise's camera suggests that they did indeed quite enjoy themselves and made several new friends. Mostly of the tall, dark, male and Latin variety.

Suffice to say it was quite a night and most of Friday was spent in the recovery position, with frequent raids on the aspirin. Though we still managed to meet up in Palermo that evening for a cocktail and dinner at an Italian restaurant. Maybe we could handle this Buenos Aires lifestyle after all?

Nice meal, but the picture hanger-upper needs sacking

We were all a bit worn out by Saturday but Louise and Vanessa had planned the perfect pick me up. They treated us to a five star breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel, just round the corner from their apartment in Recoleta, as a leaving pressie. The breakfast was fantastic and just what we needed: a huge buffet with eggs cooked anyway you like them, including eggs benedict with salmon, mmm. Thanks girls!

Suitably stuffed, we needed a stroll and walked through the city centre shopping district and back to San Telmo. We just had time for a cup of tea and a cheeky beer in the sun in the main square, when the clock struck 3 and it was time for a late lunch. As the final meal of Louise and Vanessa's trip, we also made sure it was a good one and went to Phil and Sarah's favourite restaurant of the whole trip: La Gran Parilla on the corner of Chile and Peru streets in San Telmo.

We'd left it just about long enough since breakfast and all managed a perfectly cooked steak each and a great bottle of red and all for about a tenth of the price it would have been in London! Then it was time to say goodbye and for Louise and Vanessa to jump in a taxi to the airport. And yes, the odd tear was shed. And not just because of the onion in the salad.

We really want to say a massive thanks to Louise and Vanessa for coming all this way out to see us (though we're willing to concede that the prospect of visiting Rio, Iguazu and Buenos Aires may also have had something to do with it). It was great to see Louise and to meet Vanessa and we had a fantastic two weeks with them.

So now it's just the two of us again, with only 5 weeks in the USA and the small matter of 7000 miles in a car between us and home. We can't quite believe we're nearly at the end. We're really looking forward to seeing friends and family (and Britain!) again but it's a bit strange to think that this trip that we spent two years planning and saving for, and that we set off on 9 months ago, is nearly over.

But we're banishing those melancholy thoughts for now because a whole new country and adventure awaits. We've planned our route already and will be putting up another journal entry in the next couple of days so everyone can see our intended route. Oh, and we've also booked the car: a "Ford Focus or equivalent". Not exactly rock n roll but unfortunately you don't get backpacker discounts on Cadillac convertibles.

Love Sarah and Phil xx

The Iguazu falls

sarahandphil — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 13:23:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We have spent the past three days travelling to, and exploring the Iguazu falls - the spectacular waterfalls that form the triple border between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay (see map below).

We reconvened with Louise and Vanessa in Foz de Iguacu (the border town on the Brazilian side) on Friday , Phil and Sarah having left a whole day earlier to catch the bus, whilst the girls for some strange reason thought that 22 hours on a hot sweaty bus with snoring co-passengers (no names mentioned Mr. Shaw!) might not enhance their holiday experience... we blame too many Glamour magazines and not enough ´South America on a shoestring´ - tch!

We spent the afternoon recovering from our journeys by the hotel pool (this took a wee bit longer for Sarah and Phil, who fell asleep for a good few hours thereby establishing their ´world weary travellers´ credentials even further...) - and then headed out to the local 'Churrascaria' restaurant.

Churrascarias are traditional Brazilian ´all you can eat´ grill and buffets, and we´d heard there was also live music and dancing to help wash down the meat feast at this one.

We filled our plates enthusiastically, creating some combinations of foods that bring new meaning to the word 'fusion´ (chow mein, paraguayan soup with sushi and quails eggs on the side anyone?), picked a fruity red number, and settled in for the evening´s entertainment.

Little did we know but we soon discovered we had managed to pick the most over-the-top touristy show in town, but once we had readjusted our expectations from ´authentic cultural experience´ to ´massive camp-fest´ it was absolutely brilliant! We hadn´t expected to see Paraguayan ballads played on´electric guitar, Brazilian samba girls descending from the ceiling in bikinis, or giant sequin covered ´birds´ on stilts flapping everbodies napkins off the tables, but now we have, we wouldn´t have missed it for the world!

Some of the performers had some genuine talent hiding under all the sequins too - particularly worthy of mention were some amazing Brazilian Capoeira martial arts / dancers, who were extraordinarily agile and did somersaults and flips and things like some of the guys we´d seen on the beach in Salavador (but with much snazzier outfits on), and a Uruguayan lady who twirled balls and firey things around at scarily high speed (excuse the limited dance vocab - we´ll never make the ´Stricty´ panel will we?!)

Plate spinning, bouncing and booty shaking

We also managed yet another audience participation moment, thanks to Louise, who told the compere that we had recently got engaged, the cheeky blighter! We got off fairly lightly, only having to join in with the congo at the end. A mere trifle compared to our ordeal with Mad Freddy of Santiago!

But the star turn of the evening was definitely Vanessa, who got picked out to boogie along with one of the Brazilian chappies, who apparently wanted her to join in with the ahem, traditional, bottom-smacking-with-a wooden-spoon dance. She dug deep and put in an admiral effort shaking her stuff up on the stage to much applause from the audience. Full respect!

Vanessa on stage - you go girl!

The next morning we went to visit the falls on the Brazilian side. We seem to have hit a new run of weather luck and the conditions were perfect for seeing the falls, following a recent rainy spell in the interior of the country, they are really full at the moment, and in the hot sunny weather, rainbows form everwhere in the spray from the falls.

The falls are just immense - apparently four times wider than Niagara, almost 3km in total - and taller too. It is difficult to do justice in words to the sheer scale and awesome force of the water. It is actually really quite overwhelming, and we wandered around oohing and ahhing and taking photos happily for a good few hours.

We got back to the hotel in time for a spot of sunbathing and ping pong before catching a taxi to the border to cross over to the Argentinian side, where we had a hostel booked for the next two nights.

The hostel turned out to be a ´jungle lodge´ - i.e. picturesquely leafy but absolutely full of pesky insects, so the best thing to do seemed to spend as much of the evening as possible safely tucked inside a restaurant introducing Louise and Vanessa to the pleasures of cow-sized steaks and cheaper than water wine. Well we wouldn´t want to let too much blood into our alcohol would we?!

Phil in typical South America pose - ordering food on behalf of the ladies

Next day we went to visit the other side of the falls, which were no less impressive views-wise, and also gave us the opportunity to get up close and personal with the waterfalls on a speed boat trip into the bottom of the falls. We were wished a ´happy shower´ by the tour guide - which was our first warning of how wet we were going to get...

Sploosh

We stripped down as much as we could whilst retaining some semblance of respectability - apart from Phil who left his respectability firmly on the river bank and got down to a funky pants, anorak, and lifejacket ensemble. The photos of this most spectacular outfit have mostly mysteriously disappeared, but below is a taster. If you are easily shocked please look away now....

The boat trip was fantastic - we were sped right into the falls several times, until we´d all had a good pummelling and there was no part left unwetted. Definitely a good way of getting rid of the hangover from the night before, but not a patch on the Chessington World of Adventures log flume. Hmm.

Before...

During...

...and after!

Aside from the falls themselves, the area is also home to lots of wildlife - birds and butterflies particularly, some of which are incredibly colourful, not to mention a good photographic challenge.

All in all it really is the most beautiful, awe-inspiring place to visit, and definitely one of our very top favourites of the trip. The only slight drawback was that we missed out on the Wimbledon men´s final, but thanks to Sarah´s Dad we were kept up to date by text message with an almost game-by-game regularity - we counted 16 text messages which must be some kind of Dad record!

Today we have to pack our soggy clothes and are splitting once again as Louise and Vanessa fly to Buenos Aires, and Phil and Sarah embark on their last epic South American bus journey. After the relative hardship of the standard Brazilian bus, we´ve decided to go first class tonight, where we´ve been led to believe there will be steak, champagne (!) and fully flat beds awaiting*. Blimey.

We´ll write again from B.A. before we fly to New York next Monday to pick up a car and begin our final adventure, driving from coast to coast across the USA, which we are still as excited about as on Day 1!

Until then, lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

*Yes we know Louise, that one wasn´t in South America on a shoestring book, but we´re celebrating you being here - hooray!

Rio de Janeiro

sarahandphil — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 21:43:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

You remember that last time we wrote, we were telling you how brilliant the weather had been in Salvador and how we'd spent every day basking in sunshine on the beach? So, can you guess what happened next....? That's right, it tipped it down for the next 4 days!

We suppose it is technically the Brazilian winter after all, so we can't complain too much and it there was the silver lining of being able to watch lots of Wimbledon, as well as the football.

We did manage to get to the beach during breaks from the rain on 2 ocassions, though the first time we were literally the only people there and our only company was our misplaced optimism that the clouds would clear. They didn't. Maybe we should have realised that no locals on beach = no chance of sun.

Well somebody had to make some footprints in the sand!

. .

We also popped down to the beach on Friday and managed to get 45 minutes of sun before a torrential downpour arrived. We sat it out in a bar and then headed back to the hotel once we were sure the rain had cleared. Unfortunately though, we're unlikely to be invited to audition as weather forecasters any time soon, as the rain started again when we were halfway back and we ended up drenched. Oops.

. .

Just to prove how wet we got...

. .

On Saturday we caught the plane back to Rio to meet up with Louise and Vanessa. We arrived at the apartment at 11pm and fully expected them to samba-ing the night away on their first night in Brazil, but the jetlag and a 4am start had caught up with them and they were both in bed! Poor lambs.

The apartment is really nice and just a couple of roads behind Ipanema beach and only a very short distance from the place we stayed in when we were in Rio a couple of weeks ago, and we´ve settled in very nicely, Phil especially enjoying the raised eyebrows he is getting walking back with all of these blondes on his arm...

. .

Phil and the ladies

. .

Much to the girls´excitement, we have also found a brilliant flip flop shop right near the apartment. Lucky we don´t have to go too far or Louise and Vanessa might have been heading back to the UK with longer arms after carrying the 20 pairs that we´ve bought between us so far....we are working on the story we´ll tell Brazilian customs if questions are asked (like, we have a lot of feet...??)

. .

Our flip flop purchases - and Phil trying his best to become an honourary girl (yes, that is ´Glamour´ magazine he is reading, brought all the way from London by Louise!)

. .

We have also got Louise and Vanessa playing scrabble already - well they can´t say they hadn´t been warned...

. .

Thankfully the weather is much better than the last time we were here and we all hit the beach on Sunday to soak up some Rio rays. We walked to Copacabana for lunch (it's a hard life isn't it?) and then the girls decided to stay on the beach afterwards, while Phil went to a bar to watch the Euro 2008 final, where they joined him at half-time when the sun had gone down.

. .

Rio beaches... and us being foolish (this was Louise´s influence. Honestly.)

. .

The bar we went to was packed with German expats and also had a TV crew trying to film everyone and hoping for a big reaction when Germany scored. Which of course they didn't. We're not sure where the TV crew were from, but we're assuming their footage probably didn't make for the most gripping news item that evening....

. .

On Monday we all found Jesus. Or 'O Cristo Redentor' as he's known in these parts. Or the statue of Christ the Redeemer as he's known in the English-speaking world. The statue is 130 feet tall and weighs 700 tons and stands atop the peak of the Corcovado Mountain, overlooking the city (isn't Wikipedia great for stats?!) and we took the tram to the top, where you can walk around the statue and admire the views of Rio.

. .

. .
Though admiring the view is easier said than done because the clouds tend to have a habit of getting in the way, as do all the other tourists getting their picture taken while copying the statues arms out-stretched pose. Luckily the cloud cleared just long enough and we managed to duck enough arms to be able to get some pics.

. .

Spooky-looking pylons in the clouds above Rio

. .

Waiting for ´that´ photo opportuity...

. .

We had a meal in Ipanema that evening where Louise and Vanessa were once again amazed by Phil and Sarah's grasp of Portuguese. Though when we say "amazed" we mean in the sense that they were amazed the waiter understood what we said and that we got what we ordered rather than another 4 plates of mashed potato and another 4 of chips like we got in one particularly memorable meal in Buenos Aires when our Spanish let us down. It's tricky this language business.

After dinner, Louise was keen to get back to her Irish roots so we headed to Rio's best (and possibly only) Irish bar: Shenanigans. We're not sure if the residents of Galway or Kerry or Cork would have recognised it as such but it was good fun and we knocked back a few traditional Irish drinks like er, Heineken and er, vodka and coke while bemoaning the fact that we'd arrived about 10 minutes too late to join the quiz.

We had planned to make an early start Today but the 2am finish and alcohol consumption put paid to that so we dragged ourselves out of bed and down to the beach instead. We wandered down from Ipanema to Leblon for lunch and had the world's most expensive ice cream (2 pounds 90p for a Cornetto!!) for dessert while overlooking the beach.

. .

Lunch in Leblon, and trying not to look shocked at the Cornetto prices in Ipanema

. .

On Ipanema beach again

. .

Tonight, we're off to a samba club. Though, like the football on the beach, we'll probably do more watching than joining in so the Brazilian don't laugh at us....or at least until we've had a few capairinhas to loosen up....

We're hoping to catch the cable car up to the top of Sugar Loaf mountain on Wednesday before Sarah and Phil head to Iguazu on Thursday. Louise and Vanessa have understandably decided to fly rather than join on us the budget option which involves a 22 hour bus ride, so they'll meet us there on Friday.

We've got 3 days in Iguazu before we all head to Buenos Aires for a week for tango, giant steaks and, hopefully, cheaper ice cream.

Hope all's well at home. We're assuming it's Murray-mania at the moment. Unless of course you're reading this after Wednesday and Nadal has knocked him out....

Love Sarah and Phil x x (and Louise and Vanessa!! x x)

Salvador

sarahandphil — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:39:00 GMT

Bonjourno everyone from Salvador,

Sorry it has been a while. We haven´t been doing much!

Since we arrived in Salvador last Tuesday we have fallen into a very comfortable, if predictable, pattern of spending the day on the beach, the late afternoon watching Euro 2008, and the evening drinking beer and eating prawns...

The beach we´ve been going to (Praia Barra) is really gorgeous - it is sandwiched between two old fortresses, and has loads going on from music and dancing to massages and the inevitable hawkers selling tarot readings, coconuts, and suncream.

The main drama is provided by a constant letting off of firecrackers, and a noisy cannon at one end of the beach, which keeps us unnerved all morning by going off in a slightly volatile way every lunchtime. Yesterday it actually completley misfired and appeared to go off in someone´s car parked nearby. Hmm. Today we are moving to the other end of the beach...

Click here to see a video of the cannon misfiring (wait for the second puff of smoke in front of the white building...)

Oh and there is also the excitement of whether or not we´ll get a soaking! The tide comes in very quickly at seemingly unpredictable times of day - resulting in increasingly panicked movements up the beach to the point where everyone is giggling and huddled together at the back with their bags on their laps. It is truly a daily battle of man versus nature and nature always seems to win!

Ready for battle

And if we don´t get soaked by the waves, there are always the people who come by at regular intervals with watering cans to water your feet with. Some are trying to advertise their foot massages, others seem to be just doing it for your pleasure - but it can be a bit of a surprise when you´ve just nodded off!

Two trainee foot sprinklers

There is no trouble drying off though as the weather has been absolutely perfect - approaching 30 degrees and glorious sunshine from mid-morning until sunset. So that trip stat about % of days sunning ourselves on the beach will need some adjustment next time around as even Phil´s Geordie legs have been protruding more than usual from beneath the safety of the ´sombrero´ and have started to turn a distinctly cafe latte colour*.

*It is unclear just how much this has been spurred on by the imminent arrival of Louise and Vanessa and the threat of being the palest person in their facebook pics, versus the presence of a remarkable number of well-oiled and buffed muscle-men types doing their excercises and performing impressive feats of acrobatics on the beach. Either way it is all very entertaining for Sarah!

NOT one of the muscle men! (have you ever seen such a big shadow?!)

Meanwhile Sarah has worked her way through 930 pages of David Copperfield at record speed and is now a fully competent magician.

Haha, not really, she has acually been reading the Dickens book. This perhaps unlikely Brazilian beach read has also got us the attention of a friendly chap named Thalis on the beach who came over to remark "My my, Charlie´s Dickens on our beach. That is wonderful!" - and invited us to a party he is holding at his family home tonight!

We are hoping to go along, and also have plans to drag ourselves into the old part of town later on, as there is a street party going on which is supposed to be well worth seeing. So this afternoon´s chore is to find some sequined bermuda shorts or something to turn up in - the clothes around here being at the glamorous (and skimpy) end of our wardrobes!!

Meanwhile our attempts to amuse the entire Brazilian restaurant community also continue as our shameful grasp of Portuguese menus has seen next to no improvement. We did manage one really good meal last week, on the recommendation of Russell from our guest house. It´s name was Camarou Macqueque (spicy prawn stew with rice and beans) - and it was so tasty that we made a special effort to remember Camarou = prawns.

And so we have been eating our way through every dish with the word camarou in it at the local restaurant ever since, to the point where on Saturday night we went for the unprecedented combination of prawn balls, prawn kebabs, prawn patties, prawn stew and prawn soup - much to the bafflement of the waiters!

The relentless prawn feast had to pause sadly last night however as, little did we know, but Monday is Off night around here and everything was shut.

Luckily, earlier we had (trying to get into the Wimbledon spirit!), bought ourselves a punnet of juicy strawberries. And we managed to find a pharmacy open, which was selling crisps. So that was dinner :( Yes, we know, it really is a wonder that we´ve got this far around the world without becoming malnutritioned!

Right, the beach is calling again before we drag ourselves up to the bar to watch Andy Murray at Wimbledon later on to see if he can cope with the inevitable `will he be the next Fred Perry´ media pressure... it is amazing how the sport headlines change so little from year to year isn´t it?!

Love to all, enjoy your sunshine too,

Sarah and Phil x x

Cordoba, Santiago & Rio de Janeiro

sarahandphil — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:42:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Our whistle stop tour of South America continues, with 3 days in Montevideo followed by 2 in Cordoba, 1 in Santiago, 2 in Rio and finally a planned 10 day stop in Salvador.

We took yet another South American bus from Montevideo on Wednesday evening (11th June) and it plonked us in Cordoba 14 hours later. Cordoba is Argentina´s second city and made a handy stop off on the way back to Santiago, which is where we needed to catch our flight to Rio.

Cordoba is a pleasant place with some old colonial-style buildings and a big central square that reminded us a bit of Dejmaa El Fna, the big square in Marrakech, with smoke rising from umpteen bbq stands grilling sausages.

Cordoba´s slightly creepy cathedral - and a horse and cart

Then on Friday, we decided it was time to see some Argentinian countryside rather than just stick to the cities, so what better way to do it than book ourselves on a wine and food tasting tour! The tour took us to a local vineyard where the owner delivered a fascinating explanation of the wine making process. Well at least we think it was fascinating but can´t be sure as it was all in Spanish...

Well, I suppose it is after lunch time in the UK - top me up!

We then went to a local farm where the owner once again gave a long talk in Spanish about how they made salami. The Argentinian tourists all started buying great big salamis at the end, so we assumed that what the lady said must have been good and bought one for ourselves for dinner.

Mrs. Forlini, the sausage shop owner. You wouldn´t want to meet her down a dark alley with that knife now would you?!

Though we were almost put off eating our salami meal after we were then taken into the farmyard to see the next lot of pigs destined to end up as spicy Italian sausage. We got over it though. And scoffed a whole salami for dinner.

Sorry little piggies!

After our salami feast that evening, we got another bus back over the Andes to Santiago, with plans to eat at our two favourite restaurants before we went to Rio.

Unfortunately we arrived late afternoon on Saturday and our flight was at 7am on Sunday, so we had no time for lunch and dinner. It was time to get creative...

The last time we were in Santiago, two weeks ago, Sarah had fallen in love with the anchovy toast at a little restaurant three blocks from our hotel, while our favourite meal of the whole trip was at another restaurant one block away. So there was only one thing for it. Anchovy toast starter at restaurant #1, followed by steak, chicken and chorizo brochette for main course at restaurant #2.

Unfortunately though when we got to the first restaurant the anchovy toast wasn´t on the menu, so we settled for soup instead. Luckily the brochettas were still going strong and the second place, so we piled in once again for brochettas, veg and great bottle of wine for 12 quid. We tried to persuade them to open a branch in Stoke Newington but where not sure they quite understood. Curses.

We got up at 3.30am on Sunday for the shuttle to the airport and landed in Rio early in the afternoon. It was bright and sunny and 27 degrees when we landed and just as we´d hoped it would be. From the plane we could see the famous landmarks like Copacobana beach, Sugar Loaf and the statue of Christ the Redeemer towering over the city. We had visions of sunning ourselves on the beach before donning our best samba ouftits and drinking capirinhas....

Sunrise views over the Andes as we left Santiago

But the weather had other plans. By the time, we reached our hotel in Ipanema, the temperature had plummted to mid-teens, a wind had started blowing and dark threatening clouds were threatening armageddon over Sugar Loaf mountain! We still had to see the beach though, so we popped down, stood on it for 45 seconds, then decided we´d better go back to the hotel and get our coats before we went out for dinner...

Her name is Rio and she dances in a... scarf?!

The following day, Monday, wasn´t much better and stayed overcast and barely 20 degrees all day, so we decided to sort out all our travel arrangements for the coming weeks instead...and for Phil to finally get his haircut (by Tracy, the Aussie hotel receptionist and hairdresser to the stars). Which was the first haircut since he got Sarah to shave it all off at the end of October and here are the results:

Today (Tuesday) we flew up the coast to Salvador in the Bahia region, which is known for its sunny beaches and African-infused carnival atmosphere and so far it looks like the weather at least isn´t going to disappoint. We got our pasty bods out on the beach for a few hours this afternoon and are hoping the sun will keep his party hat on for the next 10 days before we head back to Rio to meet up with Louise and Vanessa.

Sunshine at last!

Hopefully our Portugese wll improve too. We have just got back from a Grange Hill-style dinner of mixed meat covered in thick cheese sauce as a result of being forced into another entirely random selection from the menu ´cos we can´t speak a word of it. Help!!

Hope all is well at home. Stay in touch,

Love Sarah and Phil x

Trip Stats - 2/3 of the way!

sarahandphil — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Can we have a drum roll to begin this entry please? Thank you...

Yes, it´s what you´ve all been waiting for for these past three months - a second round of Sarah and Phil´s trip stats! Stay with us readers*, this one has pie charts and everything...

*prospective employers excluded

Countries we've been to = 13 - only 2 to go!

No. of days we have been away = 185

Cheesy fridge magnets now in our collection = 45 (wedding gift idea - large fridge!)

Total number of days spent on buses so far = 9.5 (6.5 of those have been in South America)

No. of times we have watched the Bourne Ultimatum on buses = 5

Total number of days spent on trains = 5.5

Total number of days spent on the beach = 4

No. of days spent playing scrabble = 2.5

Games of scrabble completed = 51(current score S32/P19) - Phil´s share has improved by 1% (though he is standing behind me now and would like to point out he did get the highest score for one game - 451!)

Books read so far = 21 (Sarah), 15 (Phil). The dramatic slowing of our reading rate is rather difficult to explain but we think it is something to do with the rising price of oil and the decreasing quality of words in general

Number of times we have read an actual physical newspaper = 4

Number of times we have read the news online = approx 370

Number of times that Phil has been asked for alternative ID = 3. Twice for buying booze (once real ale - and he has a beard for goodness sake!!), and once to get into Uruguay with the beard!

Amount spent on hair cuts = 3 pounds between us

*see fig 2 for how this breaks down against the rest of our budget...

Mosquito bites - S = 36 (almost all in South America and two on the eye and one on the ear!), P = 1 suspect, though it might just have been a spot

No. of friends who have had babies / are expecting = 3

Big Congratulations to Kerry and Lee, Nella and Ben and Jaye and Tom!!!

to be continued!...

Montevideo

sarahandphil — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Just a quick Hola from Uruguay before we get on yet another overnight bus - to Cordoba this time.

Firstly we must tell you about the first bad meal experience we´ve had for ages, which we had on our last night in B.A., after writing the last journal entry. Feeling slightly remorseful after admitting to you all about our steak and wine excesses (and because we´d already eaten two Empanadas - ham pies - each whilst doing the journal), we thought we´d try and behave like proper budget travellers again and headed for the first place we saw with a cheap tourist menu outside, despite the only people in there being the surly-looking waitress... that was our first mistake.

Next was ordering chicken - not the speciality round here, and this one was still virtually flapping when it reached our plates. As ´luck´ would have it, we´d managed to order by mistake not just two portions of mashed potato, but also two portions of chips. Since that little episode we´ve been practising our Spanish numbers - which might serve us better when it is Bus Bingo time tonight as well... fingers crossed!

Spuds... with spuds on the side. Nutricious and delicious!

On Monday we got the ferry across to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay, and then a bus on to Montevideo, where we´ve spent the past couple of days.

Montevideo is, as the Lonely Planet says, a nice compact sort of a city compared to B.A. and easily explored on foot. In theory. In reality, when we arrived, it was absolutely chucking it down, and within ten minutes we´d had quite enough of exploring and plonked our soggy bottoms straight down in a bar showing the Holland versus Italy match - where we stayed for most of the afternoon.

Montevideo on a rainy day

The bar was actually quite typical of many round here - with smart/shabby dressed waiters looking like they are auditioning for a 70s sitcom, chatting to a constant stream of men at the bar who have popped in for a quick snifter of something to warm them up on the way home from work.

You get a lot of ´little somethings´ for your money around here too. Our journey through South America so far has been mostly fuelled by Cortados - espresso with frothy milk on top. In Uruguay though, you order a Cortado, and you get not just the drink as described, but also a little dish of whipped cream, a shot of freshly squeezed orange juice, a glass of sparkling mineral water, a basket of popcorn, a miniature meringue, and a toffee sweet. What´s not to love?!

Cortado-tastic

The weather improved yesterday, so we got to have a better look about the city. You can tell it was quite a grand place in it´s heyday - with elaborate gothic buildings, palaces and some enormous municipal buildigs. However it definitely has seen better days and it is a bit sad to see many beautiful old buildings seriously crumbling.

Palcio Salvo - once the tallest building in South America

Central Montevideo

There is a mausoleum as well - so of course we had to pop in to tick off yet another famous dead person, and see Jose Artigas - a national independence hero from early 19th century battles with the Spanish who is now housed underneath the main square.

Artigas´ mausoleum

There are also some more lively characters around - business men wearing very smart suits, hats and moustaches and looking very mafiosa, rag and bone collectors in horse-driven carts, and everyone drinking ´mate´ - a kind of herbal tea that is sucked through a silver ´straw´ from a mug, and constantly topped up from a thermos flask tucked under one arm. And we thought the English were obsessed with tea!

So all in all we´ve had a pleasant couple of days seeing what Uruguay is about, and we´re definitely intrigued enough that we´re thinking it could be another place to come back to when the weather is a bit better...

All for now then. Love to all, and stay in touch,

Sarah and Phil x x

Mendoza and Buenos Aires

sarahandphil — Sun, 8 Jun 2008 22:21:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Well, we have made it to the other side of South America! We first caught a bus across the Andes to Mendoza, where we spent a couple of nights before carrying on to Buenos Aires, where we´ve been for the past five days.

After spending 20 hours on a bus from San Pedro back to Santiago, we´d been less than excited about getting straight on another bus for 8 hours more - but 8 hours is beginning to feel like a short hop around here, and it was actually a pretty enjoyable journey. We wound our way right up through the snowy Andes through winding roads and tunnels (some of which had ski pistes running over the top of them!), and then after stopping to be sniffed at by the border control huskies, curled back down the other side through central Argentina´s wine country.

Sarah - not demonstrating the reclining seats very well

The scenery here seemed suddenly very different to the vast deserts of northern Chile, snowy river gorges and red canyons, plus vineyards, ranches and horses everywhere. We didn´t spot any condors - though we´re guessing from the fact that every road side cafe, shop, hairdressers... was called El Condor, that this is where they live!

Views from the Santiago-Mendoza bus

Mendoza is a really nice town of big boulevards, Spanish-style buildings and squares, and street-side cafes. But the main attraction is definitely the vino, some of which we reckon we may just have sampled before from El Bodega de Morrisons, but it does seem more enjoyable with a big juicy steak to go with it...

The mendoza tram

A couple of days of this and we were feeling rejuventaed and ready for another bus jaunt, and booked ourselves on the overnighter to Buenos Aires. This was another awesome affair, with leather reclining seats, DVDs, and a steak and wine dinner! If Harry Potter hadn´t been the film of the day, we would have been convinced that we´d stumbled onto P Diddy´s tour bus by mistake! Oh, and did we mention you also get a game of Bingo on Argentinian buses? We tried to keep up with the rapid-fire Spanish number caller, but sadly have no idea whether we won or not :(

We arrived in Buenos Aires on Thursday, and LOVE it. It is really attractive, with grand old colonial buildings, and great big boulevards, and there is just loads to see and do.

Sarah, in the middle of the world´s biggest boulevard

We are staying in San Telmo, which is one of the oldest working class districts in the city, and the home of Tango dancing. There are actually some Tango students staying at our hostel which means free shows in the afternoon as they sashay around the living room...which is all very good for atmosphere, but not when the French Open finals and Euro 2008 are on the telly. Grr!

Street entertainment, B.A. style

San Telmo is also the location of some brilliant art and antiques markets - and we found ourselves buying some Uruguayan wood block prints to bring home yesterday, as well as some high heels for Sarah... well, we have to be prepared just in case we get dragged into any more street performances don´t we?!

Gramaphones, match boxes, soda bottles and records in San Telmo - if only we had bigger backpacks!

Predictably, we´ve also been eating several Aberdeen Steak Houses-worth of steak, chastising ourselves for eating too much steak, and then drifting into yet another steak restaurant for dinner...

Our favourite restaurant so far, ´Gran Parilla Del Plata´

It really is the best we have ever eaten, and at bargain prices too, so we´ve got to eat out in some lovely places, most of which are just a quick stumble down a cobbled street or two from our hotel. Sarah even has steak and wine tasting notes these days!

Don´t worry, there is still enough steak left in B.A. after our visit for Burger King to carry on offering these delights...

Argentinians are apparently the biggest users of plastic surgery in the world, and we can see why - it would be quite a tempting quick fix with all this steak to eat and the beach lurking just around the corner! With our dreadful Spanish though we could end up looking like the Bride (and Groom!) of Frankenstein, so we´ll spare you that drama and stick to tucking our own tummies in instead.

We´ve also done a fair bit of walking our dinners off, and have got as far as the trendy shopping and residential areas of Palermo and Recoleta.

A trendy Palermo resident

Recoleta is the wealthiest part of the city, and has the poshest cemetry ever. It is where Eva Peron is buried, and is like a small city of plush-looking tombs. Some really look quite cosy! There are also lots of cats, who seem to like curling up in cobwebby nooks, and freaking out passing tourists!

We´ll be back in B.A. a couple more times yet, and can´t wait. But before that, we are hopping across the water to Uruguay for a few days. Hopefully they have vegetables there...

Hope you´re all well and enjoying the sunny weather we´ve heard about at home. Lots of love, and stay in touch,

Sarah and Phil x x

San Pedro de Atacama

sarahandphil — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 01:16:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We got back on our first long distance bus since China on Monday to head up to San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile on the edge of the Atacama desert.

Fortunately the journey was in complete contrast to the last one in China when we got next to no sleep and Sarah's bag was slashed and stuff nicked.

This time, we were treated to fully reclining seats that turned into beds, while an attendant served us breakfast, lunch and dinner and offered us blankets and pillows. It was almost like flying business class, except that it took 24 hours to go 1,000 miles. Still, National Express have a lot they could learn...

The town itself is very small and picturesque. It's overlooked by the Andes and the Licancabur volcano and all the buildings are made from adobe bricks (i.e sand, mud, clay and water). Being on the edge of the desert, it's warm (mid-20s) and very sunny during the day but the temperature plummets well below zero at night. The night sky is also incredible with super-bright, 180 degree views of the stars.

Vicunas (like llamas but without the woolly jumpers) - in the Atacama desert

More Atacama wildlife. Spot the imposter...

On Wednesday we booked a tour out to Salar de Atacama, which is a giant salt flat in the middle of the desert and is in Los Flamencos National Reserve. Even those of you who barely speak Spanish (like us) will probably be able to work out that that means we saw some flamingos...

That was at 9am and the temperature was still below zero. Just as we were starting to warm up though, it was time to get back in the van and head up to an altitude of 4,600 metres (which is pretty high when you consider Ben Nevis is Britain's highest peak at less than 1,400m). At the same time, the sky began to fill with cloud and by the time we reached the two lakes that were our destination, the temperature had dropped to minus 15 celsius. Add to that a raging wind and we were grateful we got down again without our ears freezing off!

We should also mention that for a region that gets an average of three days of rain per year, it managed to snow for about a minute while we were "enjoying" the outdoor picnic the tour company gave us for lunch!

It won't surprise you to learn that we spent the following day sitting in the sun back in San Pedro, reading and drinking coffee and generally warming up. Though just in case you were thinking we were turning into wimps, we also booked a trip for Friday that involved getting up at 4am!

Before that though, we decided that on Thursday evening we'd walk out of town to watch the sunset from the surrounding hills. Unfortunately though, we got our timing slightly off and the sun was disappearing while we were only half way there. But rather than just give up, we decided to scramble up the nearest small hill by the roadside to get a better view.

Unfortunately we hadn't realised that on the other side of the hill was someone's house, which was guarded by three fearsome looking alsatians....

As soon as they saw us, they started barking like crazy and running towards us. Can you guess what we did? That's right, we legged it! Scrambling back down the rock and under a makeshift fence. By the time we got to the bottom, we were covered in dust and Phil had managed to get a bump and a graze on his head from the fence! Still the sunset was nice.

We got up at 4am the next day for a trip to the El Tatio Geysers. We'd hoped we'd be able to sleep in the van during the two hour ride there, but the road into the desert had other ideas and was so bumpy that we didn't get a wink.

The geysers were pretty spectacular though and are formed by the underground water being heated by volcanic activity till it rushes to the surface. Click here for a video of El tatio bubbling up!

Some geysers (and some bird)

After that, and despite the fact the temperature was just above freezing, we drove to a river and went for a swim! Though we should point out that the river water was also hot and we sat in it quite comfortably for half an hour or so. We then drove back to San Pedro via a forest of giant 300 year old cacti and arrived back in town at 1pm.

The cactus forest

At which point, anyone sensible would have gone to bed. But maybe the tiredness had made us delirious and we decided to book a sandboarding session instead.

As you can probably guess, sandboarding involves heading out to the desert to surf down the dunes on...er...snow boards. We were slightly wary when they told us the dunes were located in the area of the desert known as Death Valley, but we managed to survive in one piece. Just.

Ready, set, WIPEOUT!!

ooh it´s a bit of a long way down....do you think I´ll be alright Mr hunky Instructor Man? ooohwEEEEEEE!

Optional bonus extra...maybe. We also got some video footage of some of our sandboarding efforts, which you might be able to watch by clicking through to youtube.com here... (though we´re not too confident of our ability to get these links embedded properly, so apologies if it´s another blank screen...) http://www.youtube.com/v/ND37mnpfjAU&hl=en"></param><param

Tomorrow (Sunday) it's back on the bus to Santiago. Our original plan had been to head up to Peru and Machu Picchu but we found out that the trail is booked up till September, so we're heading to Argentina instead.

We're due back in Santiago on 15th June, when we fly to Rio de Janeiro. From there, we plan to head north to the beaches of Salvador before returning to Rio at the end of June to meet up with Louise and Vanessa. Then it'll be onto the Iguazu Falls and Buenos Aires, from where we fly to New York at the end of July. We're also hoping to squeeze in some skiing in Argentina before we leave. Hopefully we'll be better at it than sandboarding!

Love from Sarah and Phil x x

Santiago

sarahandphil — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:08:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Well after an 11 hour flight on Thursday we arrived in Chile five hours before we had left New Zealand. Yes, we know we keep going on about it but we are confused, and so are our bodies! Going back in time by 16 hours will be the greatest time change that we´ll have had on the trip and it did feel pretty weird experiencing the same time of day twice but on different sides of the world - like Groundhog Day but completely different each time. Amazing.

Anyway, we will probably get over it eventually.....so let's move on and tell you about Santiago. It has been great so far and apart from wandering about in a jet-lagged stupor, we have been having fun building ourselves back up to full strength with a combination of meat, meat and more meat. And a few spuds. It's a real vegetarian's paradise round here... not!

Luckily we aren't too fussed about these things and have found the food here pretty awesome so far (especially compared to our fish finger-based camper van diet). We've certainly had some of the best steak, lamb, chicken, veal, pork, chorizo (you get the picture) here that we ever had, and all for bargain prices. And at this rate we´re confident we'll have some good J Lo curves to show off on the beach in no time!

Another plus is that if you hang around these restaurants for long enough (which we clearly have), it is difficult to avoid sampling a few excellent red wines ... well, we do have a wedding to research for after all... Anyway, before we give you the wrong impression (or perhaps worse, the right one!), we'd better tell you what else we've been up to in Santiago.

It seems a really nice city and a good one to ease ourselves into South America. It is pretty European in terms of architecture etc. and we are finding at least some words that feel familiar. Like 'brocheta' and 'vino'...

Ahem, anyway, as I was saying - there are lots of nice things to look at - especially since the city is set at the bottom of the Andes, and is surrounded on all sides by snow capped mountain peaks. Yesterday afternoon we got the cable car up to the top of San Cristobal park which sits on a hill in the centre of the city, and got some pretty stunning views as the sun went down casting pink light over the mountains...

More amusingly, we also found ourselves centre stage in the city's main square on the first day we arrived. We must have been properly jet-lagged as we agreed to be dragged into the middle of a crowd of hundreds of onlookers by 'Loco Freddy'...

Phil wants to make it clear that he entirely blames Sarah for getting us involved in this lunacy. It's not exactly the height of the tourist season in Santiago right now but her blonde hair and blue eyes mark us out as the only foreigners in town. Which meant it was inevitable that Mad Freddy would spot us as we stopped to see what was going on. Phil's sure that with his current hair growth, he fits right in...

Anyway, Mad Freddy (as the locals know and love him) managed to hold the crowd for a good 45 minutes whilst he had us put on wigs, prance about and generally act the stupid tourists (this took a lot of acting let us tell you!). The crowd seemed to find it all highly entertaining. Very amusing we are sure.

The weather was a bit more cloudy today, so we went for a dose of culture at the two main museums - one about pre-colonial South American art, which went back thousands of years and was fascinating - the other about Chilean history - which also looked excellent, though the exhibits didn't have any English 'subtitles' - so was a bit frustrating really. Not enough brochetas and vino either.

Weather-wise it sounds like we have a similar situation here to that at home where it's sunnier Oop North at the moment. So we're heading that way (and rather more seriously, steering clear of the floods which are currently affecting some parts of the south of the country).

We're going to be staying in San Pedro de Atacama for a few days, and using it as our base to go out on a few trips to the Andean salt plains, and to explore the Atacama desert. Then it'll be back to Santiago next Monday to see if there's enough snow on those mountains for us to go skiing...

So we'll be back in touch soon to let you know which type of piste we'll be going on next (sorry...). Until then, lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

p.s. in Beard News, the stubble is back. There's a lot of beard action around here and Phil was feeling a bit naked!

Auckland and Bay of Islands

sarahandphil — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:19:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

After five fantastic weeks it's finally time to say bye bye to New Zealand, the van and Phil's beard!

We headed up to the small town of Russell in the Bay of the Islands on Saturday and had a nice relaxing day of mooching around in the sun and drinking coffee on the beach on Sunday.

Russell was a bit of a hotbed of loose morals in its early days and became known as 'the hell hole of the pacific' due to the hard drinking, fighting-type of "tourists" it attracted in those days (insert your own joke here!)

These days it's gone a little more upmarket and makes a great place for chilling out in cafes, and as a base for exploring the many islands that are situated just off this part of the coast.

Breakfast - raging hangover optional

Then on Monday, we stopped off at Waitangi which is where the British and the Maoris signed the treaty that's seen as the founding of modern New Zealand.

How to negotiate a good treaty

After that, it was back to Auckland for one final night in the van. We splashed out a whole four quid on some local "champagne" to say farewell, before returning it to the depot on Tuesday morning.

When we first got the van we were a bit concerned about how we'd manage being cooped up in a tin can for several weeks, but in the end there was almost a tear in the eye when we gave it back (and also a bit of a celebration after we'd left the depot because they'd decided not to charge us for the windscreen chip we picked up on the last day or for the plastic plate that Sarah managed to melt after microwaving it on our first night).

Though on the plus side, giving up the van means we won't have to survive on a diet of microwave spuds and fish fingers and there'll be no more cold walks to the shower block every morning....and no more peeing in a bottle in the middle of the night.....(sorry).

We stayed with our friends Gareth and Sarah on Tuesday night. They moved over to New Zealand nearly two years ago and we weren't at all surprised to hear that they love it here. They cooked us the best meal we'd had in months (no jacket potatoes or baked beans!) and we had our first night's sleep in a proper bed since leaving Australia (for those of you who don't remember, we spent our first two nights in New Zealand in a cell in a converted jail before we got the van!).

We're back in Auckland today and have a hotel in the city centre tonight, which is very close to all the bars that are showing the Champions League Final at 6.45am local time on Thursday morning. Sarah is insisting on dragging Phil out of bed at 6 so we can get a good seat... poor bloke - how does he cope?

It's safe to say that New Zealand has been by far our favourite place on our trip. The scenery is just out of this world. In fact we were wondering if Kiwis are always disappointed whenever they go abroad because it must be hard to find anywhere that beats here (Whitley Bay excepted, obviously).

Hiring a van is the perfect way to see everything and the fact we extended our time here from three to five weeks shows just how much we liked it.

The South Island is still our favourite and we haven't seen anything that can beat the sheer beauty of Lake Tekapo and Mount Cook. If anyone is thinking of coming, then make sure you also visit Akaroa (near Christchurch), Dunedin and Otago Peninsula, Milford Sound, Queenstown, the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers and Abel Tasman National Park.

The North Island has also been great and we really liked Auckland and Wellington, the Tongariro Crossing was also amazing (though pretty tough on the legs) and the crazy-coloured, smelly pools and spas of Rotorua are well worth a visit, as is the Bay of Islands.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we're off to Santiago, though thanks to the international date line, we'll be arriving in Chile before we leave New Zealand....and we'll suddenly be five hours behind UK time instead of 11 ahead of you.

Phil's also decided that a new continent requires a new look, so the beard has gone down Gareth and Sarah's plug hole...

Shaw Guevara

Philly goat (g)ruff

Phil-lage people

Naked!

Now looking more Byker Grove than hippy drop out we're hoping we'll have less trouble at Chilean immigration...

Take care. Love Sarah and Phil x

Tongariro, Rotorua & Auckland

sarahandphil — Sat, 17 May 2008 01:19:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

This week we've been climbing Mount Doom, holding our noses in Rotorua and collecting a certain ring in Auckland....

On Tuesday we did the Tongariro Crossing, which is a 7 hour walk (yes, another 7 hour walk! how did this happen?!) through Tongariro National Park. It took us over volcano craters and past multi-coloured pools full of weird volcanic chemicals and all in the shadow of Mount Ngauruhoe, which some of you might know better as Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings.

Mount Doom... and a skiing Kiwi (skiwi!)

It was pretty hard work and took us up to a height of 1900 metres but views made it well worth it. The whole central stretch of New Zealand's North Island is volcanic, which makes for truly awesome scenery, especially as we were very lucky to have a perfect day of sun and blue skies.

There's also a lot of activity still going on underground, which means that you can see steam rising out of cracks in the rocks and there are lakes and pools with amazing vibrant colours caused by volcanic chemicals seeping into them. It also meant that the highest point of the walk had no snow it because the rocks underneath were warm - which made it an ideal place to park our bums and have lunch!

We stayed by Lake Taupo on Tuesday evening, which is New Zealand's biggest and which lies in a crater caused by a huge eruption 27,000 years ago. We soaked our limbs in a thermal spa that evening, then on Wednesday morning we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed north to Rotorua.

We'd heard that car theft is rife in this town - which is one of the main draws on the North Island - so we parked in the local police station for the day and had lunch in the van!

This was also the safest option because Rotorua really stinks. Literally. It's the centre of geothermal (ooh...big word alert) activity in New Zealand and every where you look there are geysers, hot springs, crazy steam-powered power station pipes and weird coloured steam rising into the sky. You almost expect to see Willy Wonka dance by at any moment!

One tourist attraction that we were sorry to miss out on was the Prawn Park - set up by an enterprising local tradesmen this is a pretty unique sounding place where you can see prawns being reared in the warm natural waters, eat prawns 'in a variety of sauces' in their on-site restaurant - and even play mini golf over the top of the prawn beds. Sounds pretty cool but sadly we didn't have time to stop.

After Rotorua we headed to the surf bum town of Raglan on the west coast. This coast is known for its black sand beaches and good surf - but we took the leisurely option and sat in a bar and drank too much wine to celebrate again. Oops. Hicc...

Then on to Auckland where we arrived yesterday and headed straight for the jewellers who were caretaking Sarah's engagement ring. The ring has been made specially for Sarah and looks just as we had hoped. Here's a piccie for anyone who is interested...

bling!

Phil is currently perfecting his Elvis impersonations so that he might busk his way around South America to pay for it...

We have only had one day in Auckland but are very impressed so far. We spent a lovely sunny afternoon poncing about in Ponsonby - a trendy sort of area with lots of vintage clothes shops and lovely cafes. Then jumped on a train to Eden Park, where we had tickets to watch the rugby union Super14 match between the Auckland Blues and the Wellington Hurricanes. The match ended 19-17 to the locals, which gave the cheerleaders plenty to cheer about!

This morning we drove over to Devonport - a lovely suburb on the north shore of Auckland. It's a gorgeous place with sandy bays on each side and a couple of extinct volcanos to keep things interesting too! Climbing to the top gets you some great views back over Auckland (see the photo at the top of this page) and we suspected we weren't the only people to sit at the top and be envious of the lucky so-and-sos that live here!

We'll be back in Auckland on Tuesday to meet up with our friends Gareth and Sarah (two of those lucky so-and-so's who live here) before flying to Chile on Thursday. Until then, we've gone for a wee drive up to the very north tip and the Bay of Islands where we hope to spend a couple of days mooching and relaxing before gearing up for South America.

We'll be in touch again before we fly. Until then, lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

P.S. We've been keeping up with the news whilst we've been away and have followed the developments on the Chinese earthquake. As some of you will remember, we were in Chengdu for five days in mid-March and visited the panda reserve too. It's been heartbreaking to see what has happened to such an interesting place that we were lucky enough to see for ourselves so recently. Obviously our thoughts are with everyone affected.

Golden Bay, Picton and Wellington

sarahandphil — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We finally made it to the North Island!

After the Mediterranean-like Abel Tasman National park, we made it up as far as Golden Bay on the far Northern shores of the South Island, where we stayed in a nice little hippyish town called Takaka, and managed to find a temporary engagement ring for Sarah in a shop full of psychadelic T-shirts and goblin-shaped candles. The ring actually smells of incense!

Early morning mist in Golden Bay

We also visited the world's largest and purest freshwater springs at the slightly inappropriately named 'Pupu' and stopped at another nice little town called Pohara, which is only really worth mentioning so that we can include this sign we spotted there:-

Brilliant!

After another couple of days grinning at each other and putting our fellow campers off their breakfasts we thought we'd better put our travel hats back on (literally in Phil's case - the hair is getting really quite shaggy now) and get moving again.

So on Thursday we caught the Interislander ferry from Picton to Wellington. We were lucky enough to have a sunny day and a very smooth crossing, which was (as we have become accustomed to...) very scenic as the ferry passes through the Queen Charlotte Sound for the first 90 minutes or so of the crossing before reaching the Cook Strait and arriving in Wellington.

Interisland sheep

Now of course none of you will need telling that though it is only NZ's third largest city, 'Welly' is the capital (apparently some ill-educated folk think Auckland is the capital. Tch).

Wellington harbour (viewed from the warmth of a bar!)

We really loved it. It is a very cosmopolitan city, with lots of funky shops, galleries, and loads of cultural stuff going on. Which we largely ignored and went to the zoo instead to see a one legged Kiwi!

Tahi ('One Leg' in Maori) has had a fairly eventful life and is a bit of a local celebrity. He was caught in a gin trap (which are used a lot round here for 'pests' such as stoats and possums), and left his leg in it. Poor old Tahi was rescued by Wellington Zoo, and has been a star attraction since. They even got the production team who made Lord of the Rings to make him a prosthetic leg, but he didn't take to it and seems to be happier hopping about looking for worms, the crazy dude.

We also visited the fantastic Te Papa museum and went on a cable car ride to get views back over the city. It is quite a hilly place and some of the private residents have their own cable cars to access their houses - we are jealous!

Oh and last but not least, we also went shopping in Wellington - for an engagement ring! This took a bit of time since Sarah has never worn rings (or indeed any 'proper' jewellery at all!), and didn't have a clue what she wanted. To start with at least. By day 2, she had actually become surprisingly decided - on a design that not a single jeweller in Wellington had... so we had to order it to be made specially!

It's a three stone ring - with one golden-coloured diamond (like the sun - aaahh), and two small white ones to either side. We'll pick it up in Auckland next week (hopefully it'll be ready or we'll never make it to South America!) - and post a photo then for anyone who's interested in these things!

Since we arrived on the North Island the weather has taken a bit of a turn for the worse. So we've been mooching about doing not very much in some of towns on the South- West coast (Palmerston North and Waingaru) and crossing our fingers that by the time we get up to Lake Taupo - our next major stop - the sun will have come back and we can get our walking boots back on.

Until then, there's always another game of scrabble and a baked potato in the microwave...

All for now then. Lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

p.s. No we don't want to hear any more stories about how London has gone tropo and Whitley Bay is the new Bondi!

Newsflash!

sarahandphil — Tue, 6 May 2008 20:20:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Just to let you all know that we're engaged! Phil proposed on Tuesday and luckily the beard and two weeks holed up in a campervan hadn't put Sarah off and she said yes!

Guess we should fill you in on the details.....like was it romantic or was it over another meal of baked beans and jacket potatoes in a campervan? Did Sarah say "Only if the beard goes and you get a haircut because I'm not marrying a yeti"? Did Phil get down on one knee or did his dodgy ankle stop him?

Well it was actually on a deserted beach in the middle of a 7(!) hour walk down the coast of Abel Tasman National Park at the top of New Zealand's South Island. We stumbled across a beautiful big beach with no one on it and Phil got down on one knee and popped the question: "Did you remember my flask?", er, not really, "Will you marry me?".

The setting... and our only witness!

Sarah welled up a bit (hopefully tears of happiness rather than the prospect of a lifetime with this type of humour....) and said "Of course I will". Which was a relief as it would have made the 3 hour walk back to the van a bit awkward if she hadn't!

There's no date set yet and also no ring. You can tell Sarah isn't marrying Phil for his organisational skills can't you? Still, it's not easy to buy a ring when you're spending most of your time in a van or up a glacier!

Though as every engagement requires a big rock, here's one we found yesterday...

Actually we did find a real temporary ring in a craft shop in Takaka near where we got engaged. It's not exactly 24 carat but will act as a stand in until we can get to a jeweller's!

We're in Nelson now, at the top of the South Island and are getting the ferry over to Wellington on Thursday. Hopefully we'll find a ring there. We'll let you know if we do.

That's all for now!

Love from Phil and Sarah x x

P.S. we celebrated on Tuesday night with champagne in our campervan! Now that is classy....

Queenstown, Wanaka and the Glaciers

sarahandphil — Sat, 3 May 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Hope you're enjoying decent Bank Holiday weather... we've been battling through the rain and snow in New Zealand in the past few days. We arrived in Queenstown on Wednesday night, with the thermometer in our van reading about 2 degrees and snow covering the mountains round the town.

Queenstown is New Zealand's home of adventure sports with white water rafting, parasailing, bungy jumping, parachuting and all sorts of activities on offer. So we decided that now we'd got here, if we were ever going to jump out of a plane it was now or never......

Yes that's right, we decided 'never'! To be fair, Sarah would probably have done it, though preferred to spend the money on cappuccinos, whereas Phil would have had to have been drugged (like they used to do to Mr T on the A-Team) to get him in a plane.

Watch a video of the bungy jump by clicking this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dvX8OA7Hrg

At Curio Bay we hit the most southerly part of the island and visited a fascinating petrified forest - a 180 million year old forest which turned to stone when a volcanic eruption submerged it.... it sure looked scared to us anyway (hahahahaha)

Next we drove up to the enormous Te Anau lake, from where you can organise trips to Milford Sound. We chose to visit yesterday - as the weather forecast was for rain - and as we'd heard that the Sound gets around 8 metres of rain each year it hardly seemed worth waiting for a dry day...

It was actually a brilliant way to see this part of the country - which is all rainforest, green moss-covered rocks, waterfalls and lakes - and is meant to be wet wet wet. We stopped at some pretty impressive falls on the way to the Sound itself and they were roaringly full and awesome. On the way into the Sound, you see rain tumbling from literally all directions from the surrounding mountains into the glacier-created fjord. Since some of the tops of the mountains are beneath the rain/snow, it is as though there are waterfalls literally coming straight out of the sky!

Most people take a boat trip into the Sound itself so following a tip off from Sarah's Mum and Dad we went for a trip on a small boat which takes you right up close to the bottom of the waterfalls (spot the pics of us getting soggy!) - and also out into the Tasman Sea - which got pretty rocky as a storm approached (luckily Sarah had a red coat on to disguise the complimetary soup spillages!). All excellent fun.

We've arrived in Queenstown tonight and have escaped the camper van for once to go into town to use the Internet and have a curry. All the civilisation is a bit of a shock to our systems after the past 13 nights driving, eating and sleeping in the van! Hopefully we can remember how to behave in a restaurant and Phil won't try to dismantle the table after we've finished...

Hope you're all well and enjoying yourselves. Lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

(*sorry. as we said, we've been in the van for a while now and it's not doing much for Sarah's punitis...)

p.s. that's not a mountain yeti you can see with Sarah in the photo gallery - Phil has now not had a haircut for the past 2 weeks!

Akaroa, Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook, Oamaru and Dunedin

sarahandphil — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:36:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We've been in New Zealand for a week now and have decided the locals are really rude. They've got all this fantastic scenery and yet they keep it all to themselves! Outrageous. They could at least donate a few mountain ranges and lakes to Grimsby or Middlesbrough some other needy place!

Seriously though the scenery here really has to be seen to be believed. It's by far the most beautiful place either of us have ever been to. On this trip we've seen St Petersburg in the snow, the Taj Mahal at sunrise and the Yangtze in the morning mist but New Zealand tops it all. And we've only been here 7 days!

What's all this fuss about then?

We hired our campervan in Christchurch and set off round the island on Saturday evening and made our way about 50 miles east to the small town of Akaroa on the coast. It's the first and only French settlement in New Zealand and still has mainly French street names but that's really where the comparison with Europe ends.

The town is in a gorgeous natural harbour surrounded by rolling green hills and mountains. We camped there overnight and went into town in the morning before driving south via the tourist route through the mountains - stopping for a picnic by a lake on the way down the coast - before turning inland to head for Lake Tekapo.

We camped overnight by the Lake Tekapo and watched the full moon from the shoreline before getting up early for a walk up Mount John and down the side of the lake and back. At the risk of over-using adjectives, the scenery was again amazing. The lake is an incredible deep blue colour and surrounded by mountain ranges (see photo at the top of the page and the 4 below).

The lake is already quite a way above sea level so it only took about half an hour of walking to get to the top of Mt. John, which is the site of New Zealand's main observatory, and then it was about another 2 hours winding our way back down the hill and along the shoreline. We spent most of our time gawping, taking photos and repeatedly telling each other how beautiful it all was.

In the afternoon, we drove further inland to the Aoraki National Park and Mount Cook (New Zealand - and Australasia's - highest mountain at 3750 metres high) and more wonderful scenery.

Two cookie monsters - can you spot the difference?

The National Park begins at Lake Pukaki which provides an incredible view of the mountain from its southern end. The lake is an amazing pale blue colour (apparently caused by fine rock particles which come from the glaciers that feed it) which makes the view all the more special.

We camped by the lake about 40km south of Mt Cook overnight and got up in the morning for two (count em, two!) walks into the National Park and towards the mountain. The first took an hour and was to a viewing platform that gave great views of Mt Cook and the receding Mueller Glacier. The second walk took three and a half hours and took us closer to the mountain and to the edge of the Tasman Glacier, where there are pieces of broken off ice floating in the lake. We've probably waffled about the scenery far too much already, so we'll leave you to check out the gallery...

We also indulged in a spot of stone skimming at the lake :-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUEmMp_Hcms

(for some reason Sarah didn't want her efforts immortalised on the journal...)

After the walks, we drove three hours south east back to the coast and the small town of Oamaru and camped there overnight.

After stocking up on more supplies at the local supermarket, we had a wander round Oamaru in the morning and early afternoon. The town was established in the 1850s and thrived thanks to the frozen meat industry!

All that lamb they exported helped them build some very grand Victorian buildings. We went in a couple and then headed for the whiskey brewery. It was a great old warehouse building with an artist's studio and gallery at the top. We didn't actually sample the whiskey because they were offering a free tasting of port! It was really nice but we could only have the one as we had to head back to the van to find some yellow-eyed penguins.

The penguins have nests among the rocks on the Otago coast in Oamaru but are notoriously shy and won't come ashore if they see people. They only come ashore between 3pm and 6pm and we'd been warned that we might see anywhere between none and 10. We headed to the viewing point above the beach at half past three and were really lucky to see six waddling penguins in half an hour.

Here's ol' yellow eyes himself:-

http://www.youtube.com/v/BDBy1SWCn7I

It was very cold and windy up there though, so once we'd seen our penguins we hopped back in the van and headed about 80 miles south to Dunedin. The city is the second largest on the south island after Christchurch but feels much bigger and is extremely hilly. In fact, it claims to have the world's steepest street, Baldwin Street.

Though according to Wikipedia: "Baldwin Street's claim to fame has caused some controversy after it emerged that the original entry in the Guinness Book of Records was based on a typographical error, claiming a maximum gradient which would be impossible to walk up." Anyhow, it's steep and apparently the road is made of concrete because tar would melt down the road in summer!

We've had a walk up and down the city today and been to the Botanical Gardens, the art gallery and Otago Museum which is fantastic and has loads on New Zealand's history and the history and people of the Pacific Islands, including a huge Maori canoe and some very scary looking masks and spears.

We're planning to drive out onto Otago Peninsula tomorrow to see some of the wildlife, hopefully including Royal Albatrosses, seals and more Penguins.

After that, we're heading round the Southern Scenic Route via the Caitlins, Invercargill and Milford Sound. Then it's inland to Queenstown, Wanaka and Franz Josef Glacier before we head up to Abel Tasman National Park and Nelson. We should be getting the ferry across to Wellington and the north island in a week to 10 days from now.

We're sure you can tell from the amount of superlatives and the length(!) of this entry just how much we're enjoying New Zealand and we've already decided to spend four weeks here, instead of the intended three. South America will have to wait....

Love Sarah and Phil x

Christchurch

sarahandphil — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:01:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We arrived in Christchurch on Thursday after 3 great weeks in Oz. The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa which means 'Land of the Long White Cloud' and we could see why as we flew over the island.....

We spent our first two nights in New Zealand in jail! Actually at a converted prison on the outskirts of Christchurch that now serves as accommodation for backpackers.

They've left it as prison-like as possible, though we imagine the beds are bit comfier and the past inmates probably didn't have a 20 seat cinema and internet access.... Though the cells are still the original size and we had to sleep in a bunk-bed, just like the prisoners would have done.

We spent Thursday afternoon wandering around Christchurch, which was full of autumnal colours and felt very English. We had a stroll around and the city, mooched around the art gallery and, as usual, stopped at a few cafes for for coffee.

On Friday we took the Tranz Alpine train from Christchurch on the east coast across the southern Alps to Greymouth on the west coast. The journey is said to be one of the most scenic rail journeys in the world - and we wouldn't disagree!

The train climbs up towards the mountains through mile after mile of fantastic scenery with mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes etc. etc. Plus lots of sheep who amused us by legging it on mass away from the tracks to the other end of their fields every time the train went past.

***special bonus fact - the methane ahem, expelled, by those 40-odd million sheep they have here is thought to account for over 90% of New Zealand's carbon emissions. We'll stick to travelling by plane then ;) ***

They have a great outdoor observation carriage for taking photos....

We took over 200 pics and have put some in the gallery but here are a few of our favourites (see if you can spot the hobbits and orcs)...

...and here...

The trains also do a splendid Devonshire cream tea. How could we refuse?

We've hired a campervan for the rest of our time in New Zealand and are about to set off round the south island today. We think we'll take about 2 weeks going round the south island and cross by ferry to the north island at Picton. We'll arrive in Wellington on the north side and make our way up to Auckland over the following week or so.

Love from Sarah and Phil x

Melbourne

sarahandphil — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:22:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We’ve had a great week in mellow Melbourne, home of Australian cricket, tennis, trams and of course, Madge and wobbly Harold W. Bishop* from neighbours.

*** Special bonus fact #1 – Harold Bishop’s middle name was Wayne – who’d have thunk it?***

We’ve been staying with our friends Martin and Nicola, who are living and working out here at the moment and have very generously allowed us to stay for a week, eat their food, use their stuff and generally put our grubby things all over their nice smart house. We’ve offered to return the favour next time they fancy a trip to Stoke Newington, but we fancy they might not take us up for a while!

Melbourne is a great city, and one that really grows on you. It's smaller and more laid back than Sydney, so there aren’t so many ‘sights’ you have to see, but it’s fun just to wander around browsing the shops, drinking coffee (they reckon they’ve got the best cafes in the world here…) and enjoying the laid-back lifestyle.

Cafes and cakes

‘Fed’(eration) Square is the heart of the city. It’s not so much a square as a collection of modern buildings housing exhibitions, restaurants etc. and an outdoor area where people get together to watch sport, performances or TV shows on a massive screen.

So first off we found ourselves a sunny corner, ordered a pizza and watched an episode of Ready Steady Cook as the office workers busied about around us. It was a bit like being back at university really! They seem to love UK cooking shows here – particularly Gordon Ramsay’s (for a country already not averse to using the F word, this seems a slightly dangerous thing!)

After a couple of days in town, we felt like getting out and about and hired a car so we could go exploring. On Thursday we had a lovely day driving out east through the Yarra Valley and Dandenong mountains. The valley is famous for its wineries – so obviously we stopped at a couple for coffee and cakes in the sun, and a look at their cows! Strangely, we didn’t see any vines though. This, together with the high prices have left us with the sneaking suspicion that they import their wine from France and re-package it!

Anyhow, it was a really beautiful drive through farmland and forest, and we also managed to stop for a couple of lovely walks to see waterfalls and spot wildlife – kookaburras, red parrots and a lyrebird

Shaky video clips for bird fans here:-

Kookaburra: http://www.youtube.com/v/9PCXVYtMr5Y

Lyrebird: http://www.youtube.com/v/2VgeUHYNfCo

Martin and Nicola took Friday off work, so the four of us set out to drive the Great Ocean Road – a road built in the 1920s, apparently with a view to rival the Pacific Highway in California.

It’s a fantastic drive along the coast, which takes you past bays and blowholes, and the Twelve Apostles – rocky outcrops which have been cut off from the mainland by wave erosion. You can really see how when even on the relatively mild day that we visited, the waves really smash in dramatically.

There are also stories of some of the 180 ships that were wrecked along this stretch of coast, many of which had made their way all the way from Europe, making it especially poignant and sad that they got so far only to be wrecked at the very last stretch.

We drove a couple of hundred kilometres stretch of the road, breaking the trip with an overnight stop so that we could take it easy and appreciate the scenery. And the beer of course. And yet more fish and chips!

*** Special bonus fact #2 – the children’s TV show ‘Round The Twist’ was filmed at the Split Point lighthouse on the Great Ocean Road (“have you ever. Ever felt like this?.” – anyone remember it?!)***

Back in the city, they have an international Comedy Festival on here during April, so we got ourselves some tickets to see the Best of the Edinburgh Festival on Saturday night, which was, as you would expect, a good laugh with acts from London and Boston as well as Australia.

The tram journey back to St Kilda afterwards was also quite ‘entertaining’, as we were sat next to a tweed-clad chap who seemed to be impersonating Leslie Phillips (complete with ‘well, helloooo’), a particularly creepy serial killer type who was even paler than Phil (!), carrying a tool kit and sniffing a little too much for comfort, and a bunch of rowdy lads who seemed intent on beating someone up, but seemed disappointingly oblivious to the crazy gang sitting next to us! Sarah had a strange dream that night featuring Hannibal Lector in ‘Carry on Tramming’ and we were relieved to wake up in the morning with all of our limbs still intact!

Melbourne is Australia’s sporting capital, so naturally yesterday was Sport Sunday – starting at 2am for Phil, who got up to watch the Newcastle-Portsmouth 0-0 thriller (!). Then after a morning walk down the beachfront in St Kilda (the ‘sport’ continued in the form of us watching joggers while eating more cakes), we made our way to the MCG – home of Aussie rules football – for a clash between two Melbourne teams – Carlton and Collingwood.

It was a great match with 78,000 fans and plenty of action to keep us entertained through the four quarters of play. We counted at least 18 players per side on the ginormous pitch, as well as six referees, on-pitch coaches, physios and girls running on with drinks. It is basically organised chaos, and there’s so much going on that the referees don’t even seem to notice the fights that regularly break out between players during the match (one mass brawl caught on video - http://www.youtube.com/v/dKquG6YUrI8)... very entertaining!

We had decided to support the favourites - the Collingwood 'Magpies' (they were in Newcastle-style black and white stripes) - but the underdogs, Carlton won through in an excitingly close match that ended 111-88. Sarah and Nicola declared themselves firm fans of this game - a decision that had nothing to do with the skimpiness of the players shorts. At all.

Later on there were English Premier League re-runs and the London marathon to catch up on, before we fell into bed, exhausted.

We’ve a last day in Melbourne today before catching the night train back to Sydney tonight. It’ll be our third spell in Sydney and we have a couple of days staying in Glebe, so we’re hoping to revisit a few of our favourite places before flying to New Zealand on Thursday (armed with the copious notes that Sarah’s Mum and Dad have been emailing through as they make their way around the South Island – very handy!)

Hope all’s well with you all at home. Lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x x

Brisbane and Fraser Island

sarahandphil — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 00:06:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Having spent 28 hours on trains and 10 hours in a 4x4 on our 4 day trip to Brisbane and Fraser Island, we can confirm that Australia is definitely a big place!

Our journey from Sydney to Brisbane was probably only about a quarter of the way up the east coast but that was still over 600 miles, and it was another 130 miles north on the road to Fraser (meaning Sydney to Fraser is about the same distance as London to Prague!). So we’re sat on extra spongy cushions to write this update…

***Special Bonus Fact #1: the landmass of Western Europe could fit into Australia with a bit to spare - struth!***

Our train to Brisbane left Central Station in Sydney at 7.15am which meant an extra early start as we were based over the water in Manly. We set our alarm for 5.30am so we could make the first ferry of the morning and assumed not many people would be up at that hour, until we opened the curtains to see surfers already in the water! Suppose it beats a jog in the rain around Clissold Park (not that either of us has ever got up for a pre-work jog mind…)

We met Sarah’s mum and dad on the train and settled in for the next 14 hours. The Aussie trains were really good, if a little slow (top speed of about 80 miles an hour, so a bit different to the Shanghai maglev). We managed to pass the time through a combination of reading, scrabble, sleeping and gazing at the lovely green scenery accompanied by occasional yelps of “Ooh kangaroos! Look! Quick!”, much to the amusement of our fellow Aussie passengers!

We had to switch to a coach for the last 3 hours of the trip from a place called Casino and arrived in Brisbane just after 9pm. We staggered to our lovely little B&B in central Brisbane where we had a very welcome cup of tea and crashed out. Kangaroo spotting is hard work you know.

The next morning (Thursday) we set off to explore Brisbane. At breakfast, the friendly B&B owner asked us what our plans were for the day and we told him we were going to have a cruise on the river and also head to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. He very helpfully recommended that we take the river ferry to the final stop and then catch a bus up to the sanctuary. At least it would have been helpful if any buses ran from there to the sanctuary…

When we got off the boat we found that the only buses from there went back to the city centre! So we had to jump back on one and go back to where we started and tried again, this time getting a bus all the way to Lone Pine.

The sanctuary was fantastic. They have over 100 koalas of all ages and just about every Aussie animal you could think of, including kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, dingoes, lorrakeets and kookaburras plus snakes, lizards and fruitbats.

Obviously there was plenty of cooing and aaah-ing over the koalas, and we also managed to feed some kangaroos*. We’d thought that the closest we might get to them would be watching them through a fence but visitors are allowed into a field where the kangaroos live and are free to wander among them and feed them. The kangaroos were very friendly and didn’t seem remotely bothered by us and made a beeline for anyone offering feed.

***Special Bonus Fact #2:: 'Kangaroo' actually means 'I don't know' in Aboriginal. They were given the name after one of Captain Cook's gang landed and asked one of the locals what the animal was. His reply, in Aboriginal, was 'I don't know'. Poor old Skippy! ***

We also managed to feed some rainbow lorrakeets, though this time the staff gave us bowls of feed to hold out for them, so John avoided a repeat of his Sydney botanical gardens experience where the cockatoos pounced on him and took chunks out of his hands and shoulders!

After the sanctuary we went back into Brisbane and got the ferry up river to find somewhere for dinner. We thought we’d left comedy road signs behind in China but on our way to the pier we passed a motorway flyover with a sign reading “Wrong way. Go back.” The fact that the sign was about 200 yards after the last junction led us to wonder whether the oncoming juggernauts would probably be a more salient warning to drivers who’d turned in the wrong direction…

We got off the ferry at Bulimba and found a little fish and chip shop and ended our evening having dinner by the river watching an amazing sunset.

The next day was a 6.30am start to get to Fraser Island. We met Mick, our driver and guide at the excitingly named Brisbane Transit Centre along with fellow passengers Detlev from Hamburg and Brian from Barnet.

Mick drove us up the coast to Inskip Point where we got a 10 minute car ferry over to Fraser. As we pulled into Inskip we saw a convoy of 4x4s rented by drive-it-yourself backpackers who were also headed across the sand to the ferry. As they stopped ahead of us, Mick explained that they were letting air pressure out of their tires so they wouldn’t get stuck in the soft sand. He chuckled as he over took them and said he wasn’t going to bother because he knew how to drive through sand… can you guess what happened next?

That’s right, about 5 seconds later our 4x4 ground to halt and got stuck in the sand. Mick tried to be blasé about it like it was a minor problem and we weren’t really stuck, but after 30 seconds he conceded we were and we had to get out and push! The flaming galah.

Fraser Island was really spectacular. Get ready for more numbers stats fans…it has a 75 mile long beach (yes 75) that we zoomed along for about 15 miles before turning inland. The beach is just normal sand but is classified as main road and speed limits and all other road laws apply. The island itself was formed over 700,000 years simply by sand being washed from rivers into the ocean and then collecting against rocks in the sea. Birds and the wind carried seeds over and now it has the world’s largest rainforest growing in sand.

The island also has the world’s largest perched lake in the shape of Lake McKenzie. Perched lakes are formed when the wind and erosion causes a pit in the ground which fills with rainwater and eventually becomes a lake. Because they’re formed by rainwater, the water has no salt and is perfectly drinkable. We had an hour at the lake and managed to get time for a swim (and a quick drink!).

While we were there, a couple of wild dingoes came down to see if we had any grub on offer but soon wandered off after we hid our bananas! Sarah also managed to "borrow" a little of the incredibly smooth McKenzie sand which she’s been using as an exotic exfoliator. Not sure if that’s entirely within the national park regulations, but the otherwise macho Mick said he swears by it...

After Lake McKenzie we headed inland to the beautiful Wanggoolba Creek in the rainforest. We had a short walk to take in the scenery before we had to head back to beat the tide. We could have stayed a lot longer than the one day we had on the island - but we'll have some priceless memories and the long journey to get there was definitely worth it.

We got the train back to Sydney on Saturday and then spent our last day with Gerry and John on Sunday. We got the local bus to Botany Bay in the morning and had a walk along the beach and through a forest to Henry’s Point before stopping for lunch overlooking the Bay.

In the afternoon, we got the bus back into Sydney and then the ferry over to Watson Bay where we had a fantastic meal at the famous Doyle’s fish restaurant on the harbourside, with the Bay and the bright lights of Sydney as a backdrop.

After that, it was back to Sydney and time to say goodbye after a wonderful 10 days with Sarah’s mum and dad. We’re sad to see them go as we had a fantastic time with them. The weather was perfect, we packed in loads of great things, and we even got to beat them at Scrabble a few times after all of the practice we've been having recently!

Gerry and John flew off to New Zealand this morning, while we head off to Melbourne tomorrow to spend 5 days with our friends Martin and Nicola.

And finally...we think we might have worked out how to upload videos to Youtube (it only took us 5 months) so here's a test link to see if it works...a video Sarah took of some bouncing kangaroos at Lone Pine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQCOl4uWxVI

Hope all’s well at home!

Love from Sarah and Phil x

Sydney

sarahandphil — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:56:00 GMT

Hi from Sydney!

We’ve been having flaming good time in Oz so far! Having met up with Sarah’s Mum and Dad on Thursday we’ve been ‘knocking ourselves out’ with loads of sightseeing in and around Sydney (guess who’s been setting the faster pace...!)

We’re staying over in Manly – which is a surf beach and suburb to the North of the city. (As an aside, Manly apparently got it’s name ‘cos when Captain Cook and the gang arrived in the eighteenth century, the Aboriginals that greeted the party looked very, erm, manly! So this has given us the perfect excuse to pull lots of silly butch poses, and for Phil to feel full of testosterone whilst visiting e.g. the manly flower shop and the manly launderette!)

Manly keepy-uppy

Mum and Dad are staying in the centre of town – so this has meant lots of trips across the harbour on the Manly ferry to meet up – a real bonus as the ferry trip provides awesome sights of all the iconic sights – the opera house, the bridge etc. In fact we’re getting a bit too used to it now and Phil actually commented today that with the bridge on one side, and the music place on the other – it’s not really that different from Newcastle – if only they had some brown ale at these fancy bars…

In between ferry trips, we’ve managed to get a good taste of the city itself – strolling around the historic Rocks area and visiting Paddington market, going up the harbour bridge for some spectacular views (see an almost complete 360 set of ‘panos’ from Phil in the Sydney gallery…), walking in the botanical gardens (where Dad ‘made friends’ with a cockatoo and has the scars to prove it!) – and we even got to the Opera house!

John makes a friend, while the guy behind prays he glued his wig on properly...

We went to see Carmen there on Friday night – it’s really a very beautiful building and was a fantastic evening, despite the fact that the lead singer – Carmen herself – was on holiday, and her understudy had lost her voice too! But of course the show must go on – so we had the understudy acting out the part –and lip-synching to a visiting singer from Bucharest, who stood to the side of the stage! A bonza effort from the Opera Sheilas for sure, and definitely pretty unique!

Also fairly unique was watching the lights go off for ‘Earth Hour’ for 60 minutes on Saturday – we’re not sure if this happened at home too – but the idea was for everyone to switch their lights off at 8pm (noon at home so it probably wouldn’t make much difference?!) as part of a global campaign to raise awareness of the need to conserve power reserves. Most people seemed to be joining in – and the harbour did look quite different – though we were relieved to find that the Manly ferry kept its lights on and was able to find its way back home again!

The weather has been perfect – really sunny and in the high-20s. So hot in fact that Phil has been confusing the sun-kissed locals with his shade-seeking behaviour on the beach!

We spent an afternoon over in Manly and a day at Bondi (we caught the bendy bondi bus!). Both beaches are gorgeous – and actually less commercialized than we’d expected. And as we’ve been trying out the local seafood, we can announce that the award for best fish and chips goes to Bondi – though it was a close run thing and we might just arrange a re-match when we come back to Sydney in a couple of week’s time…

Yesterday we all headed out of the city for a day up in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Again, this is typically literal name – the mountains actually do look blue due to the haze coming from the Eucalyptus trees that grow here! We had a lovely walk following a path that Charles Darwin apparently took when the Beagle landed here – which took us for an hour or so down a fairly gentle path - before delivering us at the Wentworth Falls – a spectacular waterfall which appears out of nowhere and plummets into a massive valley of canyons filled with endless Eucalyptus. We took a lot of photos at this point! (see Blue Mountains gallery…). There was also plenty of wildlife to spot – herons and cockatoos for Dad to point his binoculars at, and giant spiders to scare sarah’s Mum with!

Later on we caught a bus (actually a School Bus – driven by a retired chap named Bob – or Rob – or Ron – he wasn’t fussy and seemed more interested in chatting to lost tourists than picking up school children!) – to Katoomba – which is a charming little mountain town with lots of secondhand bookshops, vintage clothes etc. – and is also the gateway to the Three Sisters – a massive stone formation overlooking the canyons. According to Dreamtime legend, the sisters were turned into stone by a witch doctor who wished to protect them from an evil uncle - but sadly could never be turned back because the uncle instead killed the doctor, who was the only one who knew how to undo the spell…bummer!

Tomorrow we’re ‘going Tropo’ - catching the train up to sweaty Brisbane, and the start of our trip up to Fraser Island. Then it’s on to Melbourne to visit out friends Martin and Nicola and our next update.

Until then, lots of love,

Sarah and Phil x

Beijing and The Great Wall

sarahandphil — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Well, Peking (as most people who live here still seem to call it) has been awesome.

The weather started off dismally on Friday - no sign of the Mongolian dust storms we'd been warned of - but we couldn't be certain if that was because they weren't there or that we just couldn't see them through the dense smog.

Nevertheless we decided to make the most of it and put on our best walking socks for a good old slog across the city. We ended up pottering about 8 miles to Tiananmen Square, through several 'hutongs' (traditional housing areas with lots of small alleyways), through Beihan Park and round its big lake, then up the hill in Jingshan Park for misty/smoggy views of the Forbidden City.

The forbidden city looking very foreboding

We haven't risked being transported in one of these yet... poor Pìglet (in the window) looks terrified!

We got to Tiananmen just in time for the ceremonial lowering of the national flag at the end of the day. It's a very imposing place - the biggest public square in the world apparently, and able to hold up to 1 million people (Anna - are you paying attention?!)

Looking north across Tiananmen Square

There was quite a crowd already when we got there but 45 minutes later all that had happened was a few shivery-looking soldiers had come out to stand round the perimeter, and the flag was still up. The changing of the guards it wasn't!

The Chinese crowds seemed to be quite enjoying it though - teenagers were talking photos on their mobile phones and everyone seemed quite content -perhaps partly due to the ever-present police and soldiers keeping an eye out for anybody breaking the decorum...

After an hour or so of this we decided that our legs couldn't take any more so we jumped on the subway home. This was one time when we could actually say we'd have preferred to be at home watching Big Brother (rather than being watched by him!)

Having walked all that way on Friday we had a lazy day on Saturday and decided the only thing we'd do would be to see if we could track down the Olympic Stadium. We found it in the end, but the photos aren't too spectacular partly because it was still very smoggy and partly because the closest security would allow us was about 500 metres away on the other side of a motorway.

The smog cleared and the sun came out on Sunday so we got up early to see if we could finally succeed in our quest to see a pickled dead Commie! After missing out on Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, we were determined not to miss Mao Tse Tung so we got up early and joined the queue at the 'Mao-soleum' (sorry!) in Tiananmen Square and this time we made it in.

Sarah in Tiananmen Square. Spot the Olympic countdown clock in the background.

The truth be told, it was all a bit weird (as you might expect!). The crowds were rushed through by guards barking instructions and grabbing the ocassional person by the shoulder to hurry them along. The Chairman was in a glass case that we passed by in about 5 seconds (he looked a bit waxy to us...maybe they got him from Madame Tussauds) then the second we walked out the room, we were in a Mao souvenir shop full of pens, badges, watches, ties, cups, you name it, all with Mao's smiling face on them. Not quite sure how this ties up with his anti-capitalist stance but "that's progress" as seems to be the motto in China these days.

Southern gate of the Forbidden City with Mao's portrait overlooking Tiananmen Square

We then spent the afternoon visiting the Forbidden City. It was really interesting strolling around the Imperial halls, the old living quarters of the emporers and their concubines, seeing the temples in which they worshipped, and some of the art and treasure that have survived the cultural revolution. Finally we got a real taste of Old China, and it was absolutely fascinating.

People living in the Forbidden City must have been taller in those days...

We were only slightly disappointed that we weren't able to have a coffee in Starbucks - which we'd heard had wormed its way into the Forbidden City itself. It seems that there are some limits to what is deemed the acceptable encroachment of capitalism after all!

Bit windy in the Forbidden City!

On Monday we visited the Great Wall at Badaling, a really fantastic experience and another real 'can't believe we're here' moment. We'd both imagined that the authenticity of the wall might have been slightly trampled under the millions of tour groups that come to visit the open sections of wall each year - however even at the section we visited (which was one of the most popular), you can get a really good idea of the immensity of it, and the effort it must have taken to build it.

It's pretty awe-inspiring to find out that the wall once stretched for 6000 kilometres, and a bit grisly that lots of bones of the workers who died during the wall's construction are buried in the wall - giving you some idea of how hard it must have been to complete all those hundreds of years ago.

Is this how they got about in the olden days then?

We were also lucky to visit on a low season Monday, so it was relatively quiet and we actually had some sections of the wall to ourselves. Which was a relief as we'd slightly under-estimated the intensity of the 'undulating' slopes of the wall and Sarah realised too late that perhaps a mini-skirt wasn't the best choice of outfit when climbing some of the very steep slopes!

On Tuesday and Wednesday the sun stayed out and we visited the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven Gardens. The Summer Palace was built on the orders of the Dowager Empress Cixi with money that was apparently intended to be spent on naval warships! It was very grand and had great views over a huge lake with temples, painted wooden walkways and trees in blossom all around it.

The Temple of Heaven Gardens also made for a pleasant wander around, while we passed away a few hours before heading to the airport. Like most parks in China, it was full of old folk exercising, mainly by practising tai chi or by walking backwards and high kicking. You wouldn't want to meet one of them in a dark alley!

Phil doing feng shui, or something, in the summer palace gardens

We've had a great time in China and the whole of Asia in fact. We'll miss the Asian madness - the amusing signposts and menu descriptions, the craziness in the parks, the 'surely two people and two backpacks can't fit in that...can they'-vehicles, and the the pea and kidney bean flavour yoghurt (which Phil had out of choice - I kid you not!), but we're also looking forward to throwing a ute on the barbie and flaming a gallah...or whatever it is they do in Oz!

By the time you read this, we'll be in Sydney so g'day for now and look out for the next bonza update soon.

Love from Phil and Sarah x x

Shanghai

sarahandphil — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:18:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We arrived early this morning in Beijing after catching the night train from Shanghai. The train was very comfy indeed - with cosy sleeper beds and lots of nice extra touches including a flask of hot water, slippers and little toothbrush and washing kits with magic expandable facecloths (which Sarah has pocketed several of for use on future occasions when we meet with fewer mod cons!)

On board the Shanghai - Beijing sleeper train and boarding the Maglev (Magnetic Levitation in case you're wondering - it "floats" milimetres above the track)

We had a great five days on the flashy East coast, going faster than we've been before on a train (at 430km per hour the 'Maglev' train from the aiport into the city takes 8 mins rather than the 1hr it would take in a taxi - whoooosh!), stretching our necks at the highest skyscraper in the world - the nearly complete Shanghai World Financial Centre (which will briefly be the tallest at 492m before the Burj Dubai is completed later this year...), having the most expensive cocktails we've had yet at the highest bar we've been to (Cloud 9 at the Jinmao tower - which is the 5th highest skyscraper in the world...)...

Oh and buying the silliest souvenir we've bought yet - a pair of flashing neon strap-on roller skates, purchased (for a bargain price!) during a weak moment at the Bund. If we can't get the hang of skating on them they might just come in handy as make-shift rucksack wheels...!

Sarah in front of Jinmao Tower (left) and Shangahi World Financial Center (the one that looks like a giant bottle opener)

Shanghai is definitely the kind of city that likes to set a few records, and the rate of development since the opening up of the economy in the 1980s is pretty astonishing. For example apparently in 2003 alone there were over 15,000 new buildings over 15-storeys high built - that's more than 50 per day! And starts to make sense of another slightly scary statsitic we heard - that China is sucking up over half of the world's concrete production...

Phil on East Nanjing road

One of the museums we visited during the week was the Urban Planning Exhibition - which was more interesting than it sounds and shows the plans for the future as well as some incredible scale models of the current skyline. It was interesting to see how they are now having to think about (re-)creating 'ecological zones' to try to act as a better pair of lungs for the choked up city. We can only hope it is not too late!

Plan of Shanghai in ten years time

The current skyline

The city feels much more Westernised than any of the other Chinese cities we've visited so far (including Beijing, judging by our first glimpses) - and is full of Western fashion brands, fast food concessions etc. We too have come to appreciate a wee fast food indulgence every so often (especially to try to get away from all of the MSG that is sprinkled on everything aruond here), and on our first night we happened to stumble into Pizza Hut...

Now although it looks the same as Pizza Hut anywhere in the world, this does not mean that the local customs are the same... On visiting the one-stop salad bar, Sarah had to hide her giggles as she spotted a lady piling up her salad about 6 inches above the level of the bowl by using a gravity defying pineapple - cucumber - pineapple layering technique to build what must have been worthy of an entry on the world's biggest salad list.. maybe she is a budding skyscraper architect trying to get some practice in!

So apart from catching up on a bit of well-overdue pizza and retail therapy (spot the new clothes in the pics - hoorah!), we've also managed to get a bit of culture down us.

We saw an acrobatics show on Wednesday night - with eye-boggling feats of juggling, hoop-jumping, trapezing (?) and diablo dancing (remember 'wow balls' anyone?! these were in a very different league to our school-yard efforts!). Do not fear parents, we will not be running off to join the circus anytime soon!

We also visited the Shanghai Museum (which has an amazing collection of ancient Chinese ceramics, sculpture and calligraphy), and spent an afternoon soaking up a bit of cafe culture in a gorgeous old area of alleyways around Takang Road that has been turned into a funky Spitalfields-esque gallery/boutique area.

Coffee time in Takang Road

There are some really well-preserved old areas in Shanghai, with some great examples of colonial-era architecture at the famous Bund (on the riverbank of the Huangpu river) in particular.

Walking along the riverfront you can really imagine the city in it's 1930s trading heyday, and though the old trams and rickshaws have been replaced with executive saloons and motorbike taxis, the river is still busy with cargo, street hawkers and general bustle, and perhaps in some ways is not so dissimilar to how it was back then, with making (and spending) money the main agenda.

The Bund

Old and new Shanghai

It was also interesting strolling round the old French concession seeing the site of the first ever Chinese Communist Party meetings and some of the houses where the senior officers lived during the very, erm, different times of the Cultural Revolution. It's amazing to think how some of the old folk we've seen (again, we hung out with them in the park for a while yesterday!) will have seen so many changes over the course of just the last few decades.

Dancers in the park

Anyhow, more changes for us too and here we are in Beijing - all of a sudden in our last week in Asia! We've been slightly worried about the weather here because we read (after booking our train tickets...) in the papers about dust storms arriving here this week.

Apparently they come from the Mongolian desert and are a regular Spring event. Those more in the know than us are moving swiftly southward to the more moderate climes of Shanghai! So far however it has only been rain hitting our umbrellas (we're not sure whether this is real rain or the 'fake rain' seeded by the Government to try to help clear the storms...) - fingers crossed we'll not end the week looking like sandpaper!

On Wednesday then we're off to Sydney, to meet up with Sarah's Mum and Dad (who are currently just beginning their own mini round-the-world tour in Singapore) - we'll send another update before then. All for now then, lots of love to you all, and Happy Easter holidays!

Sarah and Phil x x

Yangtze river cruise

sarahandphil — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:04:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We're back from our four day trip down the Yangtze and had a fantastic time. The scenery was incredible, the weather was (eventually) sunny and the boat was great. We really couldn't have asked for any more!

We left an overcast Chengdu on Wednesday morning and the bus arrived in a very rainy Chongqing* 4 hours later. Visibility was down to about 20 metres and it looked like we'd be lucky to see the boat, never mind the Three Gorges!

(*By the way, for you fact fans out there, we should mention that Chongqing is the world's largest city by some calculations. The centre only has about 5 million inhabitants, but the municipal boundaries encompass over 30 million. How about that eh?)

fog on the Tyne.. or is that the Yangtze?!

We briefly toyed with the idea of giving up on the cruise and flying straight Shanghai but decided that seeing as we'd come all the way to Chongqing, we should get on the boat and cross our fingers that the weather would change. We're glad we did!

setting off in the fog - with four days provisions

We managed to book tickets for a boat leaving that evening and had our own private cabin for the trip. We booked with a Chinese operated ship rather than one of the much more expensive cruises offered by American and European companies. It was a bit of a gamble because we'd heard from various sources that the standard of boat was pretty much pot luck and that some of the Chinese ships were quite poor. But as it turned out, we really couldn't have any complaints about the boat we ended up on, and are considering trading in our house for a boat like this to live on when we get home!

Sarah in our cabin

Our cabin was clean and fairly spacious, with an ensuite bathroom. It was so nice that we even decided not to upgrade to the "executive suite" that we were offered within minutes of getting on board. The executive suite was much bigger, and even had a chaise longue (!!) but we decided the extra 20 quid didn't compensate for the fact that some genius had decided it would best be located right next to the all night karaoke bar. And the Chinese do love a bit of karaoke....even from much further down the corridor, there were several times when we were "treated" to what sounded like small creatures being strangled to the latest Chinese hits!

The boat left at 11pm on Wednesday night and we woke up to a dry though hazy view out of our cabin window on Thursday morning.

But the haze lifted within a couple of hours and the rest of the day stayed sunny. The views of the gorges were fantastic, with enormous mountains and cliffs lining the river. We'll leave it to the photos to show exactly how good!

The boat stopped at a couple of temples and an abandoned "ghost" city on the way downriver but we decided to stay on board. Each stop was quite expensive and we'd read that the sights weren't that great. This was confirmed by a couple we met who said the abandoned city could only be termed "abandoned" if you didn't include the people still living there and the numerous hawkers chasing them down every street trying to sell them iffy tourist souvenirs!

Instead, we stayed on the boat and contented ourselves with games of scrabble while eating our bodyweights in cashew nuts and chocolate and enjoying the very finest 'Great Wall' wine. Yes, you read that right. We were drinking Chinese wine. Suffice to say the French probably don't have too much to worry about just yet.

Cracking open the Great Wall wine. Note the new jeans - 2 pounds from the Chinese supermarket!

The weather was even sunnier on Friday (warm enough for t-shirts!) and just after lunch we transferred onto a smaller boat for a 6 hour trip up the 'Little Three Gorges' - and then the 'Mini Three gorges'. The main Three Gorges are on the Yangtze River between Chongqing and Yichang, the Little Three gorges run off the main river, and the Mini Three Gorges are on a tributary running off that - so three lots of three - neat eh!

On the mini three gorges

Each new set of gorges gets a little narrower and shallower than the last - meaning two boat switches - but the scenery gets even more spectacular with each turn. The cliff faces get taller and the narrowness really makes them feel massive as they loom over you. The Chinese tourists show their appreciation of all of this by getting very noisy and as we cruised up the mini gorges we were treated to a bit of group singing and a tour guide doing some kind of repeat-after-me chanting to erm, enhance the natural beauty of our surroundings!

Back on the main cruise boat and it was time for dinner. Now apart from about 6 Westerners, all the other passengers were Chinese and only two of the crew spoke any English and even that was very little, which made for fun at meal times when we tried to order food by trying to match up Chinese characters with our phrase book.

Eventually, we found out there was a menu with English translations, which did help a bit but not entirely....a lot of the translations were fine but some did leave us a tad confused. By far the most perplexing of which was a seafood dish described as (we kid you not) "A kind of very famous rough hot fish near the airport". Here´s a photo in case you don´t believe us...

our favourite 'Chinglish' translation so far!

aubergines for dinner - these weren't from anywhere near the airport, disappointingly!

The boat arrived at the Three Gorges Dam early on Saturday afternoon, which is where we got off. We're not sure why the boat didn't carry on past the dam (boats can get through) and on to Yichang as we'd been told by the travel agent but we were transferred to Yichang by bus instead.

we got bored at this point - and made a dalek out of crunchy biscuits

The dam itself stretches 2 kilometres across one of the widest stretches of the Yangtze, though it's actually not very tall. We were expecting something like the Hoover Dam but it's "only" about 180 metres tall.

the three gorges damn - through the fog

The building of the dam has obviously been very controversial with lots of concerns over how it will affect the environment. Around 1.5 million people will have to leave their homes because of the rise in the water level when the dam is fully operative next year (13 cities, 140 towns and over 1,300 villages will be submerged). The flow of the river will also slow and there are concerns over how this will affect the river's ability to oxygenate and clean itself. Some people have said that it could end up as the world's biggest septic tank. We really hope the damage is as limited as possible and we feel privileged that we had the opportunity to see the river and the Little (and Mini!) Three Gorges in all their glories.

Upon arrival in Yichang, we caught another bus to Wuhan where we stayed the night before flying to Shanghai on Sunday. Wuhan is aother huge city that we hadn't even heard of before we got to China and is home to the world's 18th tallest buiding, which we think we just about saw through the rain on Sunday morning.

Wuhan in the morning. Don´t bother.

We had a bit of a surreal time in Wuhan....by the time we arrived late on Saturday, it was tipping it down again so we repeated our lazy backpackers sin of taking a room in the hotel oustide where the bus dropped us off, but again were rewarded with a perfectly pleasant (if slightly bland businessman-oriented) hotel with an amusing line in 'non-complimentary toiletries'...

The hotel restaurant was closed so we popped to one next door, where the staff spoke no English and where we were sat near some black plastic bags containing mystery live animals that kept twitching and hitting out at the inside of their bags... thankfully the menu had pictures so we pointed at a picture of a fish and some broccoli... which arrived looking reassuringly dead!

On Sunday morning we had a few hours to kill before we needed to leave for the airport so we had a look around Wuhan in the rain. It's fair to say it's not the most glamorous place we've ever been to. The rain probably didn't help but the whole city felt like a building site with new skyscrapers popping up everywhere and all the old buildings being demolished to make way. We travelled a few stops on the skytrain and then got off for a stroll down the promenade by the river. Not surprisingly, we were the only ones there!

we got bored in Wuhan too...

Eventually we gave up and made our way to the airport and to Shanghai where we are spending five days. We'll try to send another update before moving on to our last stop in China, Beijing on Thursday night.

'Speak' to you all then! Lots of love,

Phil and Sarah x x

Leshan and Chongqing

sarahandphil — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:22:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update before we get on our boat and sail down the Yangtze. Well at least we've been told it's the Yangtze lurking out their beneath the grey skies... to be honest it could be the Amazon jungle for all we can see outside!

fog on the Tyne.. or is that the Yangtze?!

Michael Fish would probably grimace and describe the weather here today as grizzly (i.e. grey and drizzly). So we have all of our fingers and toes crossed that it might improve for at least some of our four days on the boat... otherwise you can expect a pallid looking and blinky-eyed pair to emerge on Saturday, having spent four days playing scrabble whilst consuming all of the 'Great Wall' Chinese wine, chocolate and cashew nuts that we've just bought from Carrefour!

We've enjoyed the last couple of days in Chengdu - which we spent mostly mooching about - and drinking tea - lots of it! Green tea, black tea, jasmine tea, chrysanthemum tea... we've had it all! We've actually been doing a bit of a tour of Chengdu's historic teahouses, which are mostly located in city parks - some of the last remaining parts of 'Old China' and where the older Chinese people seem to hang out during the day - and we think they have the right idea!

Getting away from the smog and chaos of the city is definitely the way to go here, and the old folks seem to have a lot more fun than the bright young things working in the concrete metropolis, as they while away the day playing mahjong or cards (many placing a little wager to make things a little more interesting!), or joining in one of the Tai Chi, dancing sessions or karaoke. Yes, anyone can turn up and sing karaoke in the park - and at any one time there are four or five different booths - all pitching out Chinese pop at top volume. Chinese people don't seem to go in for peace and quiet all that much!

´tie´chi and dancing in the park

We did also try to go up the Mountain we mentioned in the last entry, but didn't quite make it - thwarted by the grizzle once again. We don't seem to be very good at mountains. Or communist mausoleums... maybe we'll have to take a detour via Cuba before we come home!

We did however manage to get a bus out to Leshan - a town about 100km from Chengdu which is famous for having the world's largest buddha statue - full stop - no 'reclining' or 'with golden fingernails' caveats this time!

the giant buddha looks out at some of Leshan's newer buildings

stop it - you're tickling my toes!

He was pretty spectacular anyway, regardless of his record-breaking credentials - with toes the size of Phil and ears the size of a bus!

the Chinese seem to have a peculiarly fatalistic view of health and safety

In other news we are very excited to have some more visitors coming to see us in June - the lovely Miss Humphreys and her friend Vanessa. They will be meeting us in Rio on June 28th for cocktails on Copacabana beach and travelling down to Buenos Aires, via the Iguacu falls with us. We can't wait and are also looking forward to watching our blog readership soar as two lovely ladies join our entourage!!

Kunming and Chengdu

sarahandphil — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 23:44:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Well we've arrived in China safe and sound. But not before we collected some more ‘travel experiences’ to tell you about…

After our 7 hour wait at the border on Tuesday, we finally boarded the 6pm sleeper bus to Kunming and quickly made ourselves erm, uncomfortable on our place-mat sized bunk beds. Sarah’s feel dangling over the end of her bed, Phil’s practically over the shoulders of the guy in front of him, we departed for a night of fun on south west China’s bumpy roads…

What with being bounced about, stops for police checks and toilet breaks and the noisy coughing and spitting of our fellow passengers, we felt like we’d got about 14 minutes sleep between us, however when Sarah woke up as we pulled in to Kunming station she noticed a curious hole in her day rucksack that hadn’t been there the before, and her camera, i-pod and cash had gone missing. .. It quickly became obvious that someone had cut into her bag wth a razor blade and helped themselves to the contents.

Trying to communicate this to the bus driver was no easy task and, despite some creative and energetic use of our trusty picture dictionary, we failed to inspire much action on the bus driver's part and as everyone, thief included, got off the bus and drifted off into Kunming city, we gave up on any hope of getting back the missing things and instead turned our efforts to finding a policeman to report the theft too.

We did find a station fairly quickly, and though none of the officers inside spoke English themselves, they called a very helpful English speaking policewoman, who took down a draft incident report quickly and gave us an address of where to take it to next, as well as offering us her top 5 places to see list in Kunming as well as some restaurant tips!

Feeling slightly less forlorn, and ready for some breakfast by now, we set off in taxi to find our hotel. This too proved more complicated than you might imagine. We had anticipated that the taxi drivers might not speak English, and had managed to find the name of our hotel in Chinese the day before. However rather than trying to copy the intricate Chinese characters ourselves, we thought we’d be clever and photograph the address on screen of the computer, so that we could show that more accurate version to the driver instead. This was all on Sarah’s camera of course – which we no longer had. Oh joy!

The driver by now (perhaps not surprisingly) had given up on any efforts of communication and instead took us on a magical mystery tour of Kunming, perhaps hoping that we might spot our hotel if we drifted about for long enough. This strategy didn’t look too likely to yield results since, although few people have probably heard of Kunming, rather like lots of Chinese cities we’ve never heard of, it’s HUGE – about the size of Birmingham in fact!

So after about an hour of this misery, we gave up and instead asked to be taken to the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, where we needed to go anyway in order to get the incident report registered (thankfully, we had this address written down in Chinese from the helpful lady officer). This bit of the morning proved to go much more smoothly as we were seen to immediately and treated like minor visiting foreign dignitaries. As our report was efficiently processed and translated, we were offered drinks and taken around the station to meet and greet some of Kunming police’s head honchos, all of whom seemed very jolly indeed (“this is Mr Fu, my boss – he speaks German!”). After half an hour or so of this, and with the necessary documents in hand, we were sent on our way with a hotel recommendation and its name written in Chinese (which we gratefully took!), an earnest 'be careful now' (which we politely nodded to), and a cheerful wave.

Obviously this incident has been very annoying, however it could really have been a lot worse and we’re just grateful that we’re both OK, and that we also didn’t lose anything of sentimental value, apart from a few music videos (I’ll sadly not get to introduce the tribes people of the Peruvian hinterlands to Wham after all!!). Perhaps the luckiest thing of all in fact was that during our loooong wait for the sleeper bus the day before, Sarah had copied all of her photos onto a memory stick, which she then put safe and sound in her handbag, where it still is. Phew.

Another plus was that this did give us the perfect opportunity to hit China’s shops when we arrived in Kunming, to look for a camera replacement. This was a real eye-opener. We had expected to be craning our necks gazing up at Shanghai’s and Beijing’s skyscrapers – but even in Kunming and Chengdu (where we are now) – small provincial towns by comparison – the shops, offices (and hundreds of banks in particular) are just on a different scale – there’s just street after street of skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper… we can confirm that China has well and truly embraced capitalism, and there seems to be a LOT of money floating about.

Bag-burglary incident aside, Kunming was a perfectly pleasant place to spend a couple of days easing ourselves into China, being relatively warm, modern, well-organised and friendly (every so often someone shouted ‘nice to meet you!’ or ‘Hello England!’ across the road at us). With few real ‘sights’ to see, and having become exhausted of camera shopping, we were free to mooch and spent a good day wandering around the university area where there are trendy shops and cafes, and wandering around the park where we saw the locals relaxing joining in sing-a-long Chinese opera, flying giant kites 1000s of metres up in the air or bouncing around on springy stilts (there is probably a better name but I don’t know it – see photos!) – all pretty entertaining!

We decided to fly to Chengdu yesterday (we got a very cheap deal and it saved us 22 hours on a train) and sadly seem to have left the sun behind in Kunming. It’s well and truly dismal here – cold, wet and with grey skies that serve to make the view out of our window of the mega-concrete skyline look like some kind of nightmare post-nuclear vision of the future. That might be a bit of an exaggeration (!) but you will get the idea from the pictures.

Downtown Chengdu as dusk falls - Mao looking on

Our first foray into the city was for another unsuccessful trawl around the electronic shops yesterday afternoon (camera prices being as standardized as the office buildings…), then to one of very few preserved ‘old style’ streets (now featuring attractive antique and craft shops aimed mostly at tourists).

Sarah in one of the few preserved areas of old Chengdu

After that, making an effort to try and re-balance the books a little after the losses on the bus, we thought we’d go into one of the big supermarkets to try and see if we could find some local produce to make a cheap and cheerful meal ourselves (we have a budget spreadsheet to think about after all!) but this too was a bit of a culture shock. On offer was decidedly the weirdest 'food' we’ve seen in the whole of Asia! Giant aquariums containing all sorts of miserable looking sea creatures (can you blame them for looking miserable?), live giant frogs on the deli counter and sad-looking turtles without their shells (but still alive). An ´interesting´ experience, but a bit baffling and we left boggle-eyed and still hungry!

So we have decided instead to opt for blissful ignorance of the ingredients that we’re eating and hit the restaurants instead, where we’ve actually had some very good experiences. Sichuan food is apparently the spiciest in China and we’ve been tucking in to herby dumplings for breakfast, ginormous bowls of spicy noodles for lunch and roasted fish and meat for dinner. All very different to the English take on Chinese food!

This morning we thought our best chance of escaping the greyness might be to get out of the city, so we got ourselves onto a trip out to see Chengdu’s famous Panda Reserve this morning. The reserve has had a lot of success at breeding in the past 5 years and they now have 48 bears, many of whom were out today, doing the things that pandas do (munching bamboo, scratching and dozing mostly – all whilst being ridiculously cute!)

It's possible to be cynical about the state's motives for supporting high profile panda projects, however it is difficult not to feel all warm and fuzzy at the sight of so many healthy, happy bears. The cubs in particular had all of the adults ‘ahhhing’ along with the kids and they had us stood out in the cold and rain for ages watching them tumbling about and shakily climbing trees. You can actually pay to have a cuddle with one of the cubs, but on balance we thought it was very expensive, and perhaps the panda wouldn’t enjoy it as much as we did!

One more Panda pic for luck!

It’s still grey all the way outside so we’ve opted for a lazy afternoon in. Luckily we’re staying in 'Sim’s Cozy Guesthouse' which is indeed cozy and has free DVDs, games and books to borrow, as well as cheap Internet and chocolate brownies – so we’re planning to watch Chinatown on DVD and catch up on bit of (real paper) journal writing*.

We're crossing our fingers that the weather improves in the next few days however and we can get out and about again. If it does clear-up, we’re planning to go up a mountain (Emei Shan) – about 130km from here. I’ll refrain from using the term ‘climb’ at this stage because we heard a rumour of a cable car and have made no promises not to use it… If it doesn’t get any better outside on the other hand, Sarah has read about a Sichuan cooking course down the road which we could book ourselves on to polish our spring roll rolling skills… we’ll let you know which way things turn out later in the week…

Meanwhile, we heard that the weather’s been pretty awful at home too so hope that no-one’s been too badly affected by any storms etc. and you’re all enjoying cream egg season (yes, we’re missing them!)

All the best for now,

Sarah and Phil x x

* Actually we’ve been on the Internet for 5 hours now and have already eaten the chocolate brownie we were supposed to be saving for tonight as Sarah lost this journal entry when her computer had a disk failure and had to start from scratch again – grrr!!!

Trip Stats - 1/3 of the way!

sarahandphil — Tue, 4 Mar 2008 05:34:00 GMT

Seeing as we're now four months into our trip we thought we'd do a bit of quantitative analysis on our experiences So far and have spent our spare afternoon at the Chinese border putting together a few trip stats...

Countries we've been to = 7

Flights taken = 9

Air miles accumulated = 8500

Years we will need to cycle for to offset all this carbon guilt = 236

Favourite journeys so far:

1. Japanese bullet train to Hiroshima

2. Slow boat down the Mekong river

3. Round the Moscow circle line looking at the bling stations and furry people (people in furs that is!)

Funniest creature moment - our polite little Indian mouse cleaning his whiskers after enjoying some leftovers in our 1st class train couchette

Cheesy fridge magnets now in our collection = 10

Percentage of collection still intact with magnet = 50% (lesson learnt - don't try to post magnets home - customs don't like them!)

Books read so far = 15 (Sarah), 10 (Phil "but they had loads more words in them!")

Best value for money places so far:

1. Chiang Mai, Thailand

2. Vang Vieng, Laos

3. Japan (not cheap, but not as bad as we thought and worth every penny)

Times Phil has banged his head on things that are just too low in Asia - too many to count!

Number of cigarettes Sarah has smoked since Jan 1st = 0

Increase in Sarah's vented steam (mostly aimed at useless bus drivers) since Jan 1st = 300%

Games of scrabble completed = 20 (current score S12/P8)

Our favourite meals so far:

1. Seafood lunch, floating in Halong Bay

2. Our thai cookery course beauties, on the farm near Chiang Mai

3. Ginormous buffet in Corbett National Park, India (if we forget about the after-effects...)

to be continued!...

Sapa

sarahandphil — Tue, 4 Mar 2008 03:08:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We've made it to China! Well across the border anyway. We're now sat in an internet cafe with 8 hours to kill before our bus journey to Kunming because our travel agent messed up the bus booking! Grrr. He told us he'd arrange tickets for the 11am bus but when we arrived it was sold out and the next one's not till 6pm. If only we'd been on a Chinese course before we left, we could have arranged it ourselves!

We've just spent two great days in Sapa, in the mountains of northern Vietnam....though we nearly didn't make it there either...

We got to Hanoi train station in good time on Saturday evening but when we showed our tickets at the platform, the guard told us we only had the return section of the tickets (despite the fact we were only travelling one way) and no tickets from Hanoi to Lao Cai (the nearest station to Sapa)! Turns out our friendly travel agent had managed to give us the wrong tickets for that journey too!

When the tickets were dropped off at our hotel on Saturday afternoon, we did point out that the time on them said 8.15pm and not 9.15pm as we'd been told but the travel agent's assistant said that was fine. All the ticket details were written in pen and had Saturday's date on them we had to assume it was ok.

Anyway, after about 40 minutes of toing and froing, phone calls with the travel agent and conversations with the guards, some tickets were produced from somewhere (we're still not sure where) and we boarded the 9.15pm train that we'd originally been told we were booked on.

Thankfully the rest of the trip was much better organised and we had a great time trekking round the mountains of Sapa and visiting hill tribe villages on Sunday and Monday.

We didn't have very well-formed expectations of Sapa before we got there, but if we had, they would have been wrong! It's a very civilised place, built by the French around the turn of the last century and feels very Milka-advert-y, just like an Alpine ski resort!

It's also been very cold at night - so cold in fact that three duvets and a bedspread still wasn't enough and we've been sleeping in our jumpers and socks!!

But the weather has been perfect during the day for trekking as it warms up to about 20 degrees with the strong sunshine. The first trek was more of a walk really. Our guide 'Bing' met us after lunch on Sunday and we set off in our group of four (Bing, us and Queen - a lovely Thai IT lady)for Cat Cat village about 2 miles from Sapa town.

The scenery was amazing as we walked down into the valley and through the village. We could just about see the top of Mount Fansipan (Vietnam's highest) through the cloud and were surrounded by rice paddies, buffalo, and friendly ducks as we made our way down to the river at the bottom.

There are four different hill tribes in northern Vietnam and Cat Cat is inhabited by the H'Mong. They were very friendly and obvioulsy used to tourists and spoke very good English as they offered us handicrafts and traditional jewellery. Although they've been touched by the modern world, have access to good health care and schooling etc, many still live in traditional houses and wear traditional dress and most make their living off the land.

Different generations of Hmong people

On Monday we had a full day trek of about 8 miles through the valleys to Loa Choa and Ta Van villages. The scenery was even more amazing than the previous day and the photos in the gallery don't really do it justice - the camera couldn't unfortunately see as far as we could!

We managed to find two extra guides for the trek on Monday, in the shape of two H'Mong women who approached us in Sapa asking us to buy crafts from them and then decided to walk with us for the next 6 miles on the way back to their villages. They spoke good English and had a great line in direct questionning. Like most H'mong we spoke to, most conversations consisted of them rattling off quick fire questions, usually:
"Hi, what's your name?"
"How old are you?"
"How many brothers and sisters you have?"
"How long you together?"
"You have baby?"
"You buy something from me?"

Eventually we did buy something from them. A bracelet and a strange kazoo-type musical instrument that we still haven't worked out how to play!

We got back to our hotel just in time for dinner and a well deserved beer and then crashed out for the night before we got a minibus to the Vietnam-China border this morning.

We breezed through passport control and managed to keep hold of our China Lonely Planet guidebook, which the book itself warns is sometimes confiscated on the way into China (presumably because it "tells it like it is" and isn't always 100% complimentary). So we're off to read that for the next 6 hours, while we wait for the bus!

Take care everyone and hopefully we'll send our next update after Kunming.

Love,

Phil and Sarah x x

Halong Bay

sarahandphil — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:58:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update as we unexpectedly found an internet connection at the hotel we're staying in tonight!

We're now on Day 2 of our tour of Halong bay, having spent last night in a cozy cabin on a Chinese Junk (the boats with the big sails that you have probably seen on tea packaging!).

It is a really lovely old boat and we've had a great time cruising around the bay and enjoying freshly cooked seafood meals on board. We know for certain that the seafood is fresh because we've been stopping off at floating fishing villages to stock up every so often! The villages are really quite amazing - people actually live all the time in the very simple floating houses, and most make their living by catching and selling fish (and the occasional packet of Pringles!) at market and to passing boats.

Fishing village in Halong Bay

The area is really famous for its scenery - characterised by incredible weirdly shaped limestone rock formations and islets (as seen in the James Bond film 'Tomorrow Never Dies'!).

So of course we've taken brazillions of photos, some of which we'll include here, the rest of which will join the now massive file of 'to be prioritised at a later date' photos!

We struck lucky with the weather in the end too. Like China, they've had a particularly harsh winter in Vietnam this year - which is taking its time to finish! So when we set off yesterday we were both struggling to maintain enthusiasm and saying how 'atmospherically misty' it was going to be... (i.e. freezing cold, grey and damp!) - and it did stay like that yesterday evening and this morning - but at about 11am today it started brightening up, and turned into the first really sunny afternoon of spring - so we got to see the landscape in a good range of climatic conditions!

We also stopped at an island yesterday to see some amazing caves which have formed over millions of years by volcanic activity (referred to as 'Vulcans' by our German shipmate, Robert) - and waves. Some of the caves were really spectacular with giant stalactites and stalagmites, most of which have equally elaborate legends attached to them... in fact some of the stories are so convoluted that we were tempted to sneak off into one of the darker corners of the cave after half an hour or so of enthusiastic explanation by our guide!

Colourful caves

It's just a bit of a shame that some of the recently added 'mood lighting' gives the feeling of a Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen - inspired Santa's grotto. Viewing them through the black and white setting on the camera actually made for an improvement!

We've also managed to partake in some of the voluntary activities on offer today - mountain biking through a national park area and a lovely little village on Cat Ba island, and kayaking around the bay to explore a few of the tiny and beautiful protected beaches that are scattered around the bay. No doubt our biceps will be creaking tomorrow at their first real exertion for 6 weeks or so (since we last went kayaking in fact!)

Us, being active (and then sitting down quickly!)

We didn´t get too close to this one in our kayak - looks dangerous!

Baby monkey and incy wincey fish seen on the islands

Eating a fresh seafood lunch just off Cat Ba Island

Anyway, it's bed time now and we're very pleased about this particularly because we are in a relatively fancy hotel as part of the organised tour and were embarassingly excited to find in our room...guess what?! No, not a jacuzzi bath, nor a surround sound stereo system... but a kettle! It's the first time we've had one on the entire trip and means that Sarah can finally use some of the organic rooibos tea bags that she's had carefully stashed away in a rucksack pocket since we left in November - hooray for tea!!

Thanks so much everyone by the way for the book recommendations and travel tips - and for staying in touch too - we miss you all lots and love hearing news from home.

Until China then,

Sarah and Phil x x

Hanoi

sarahandphil — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:30:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Hope you've all recovered from the earthquake! Things have been a bit less dramatic round here as we've spent 4 days relaxing in Hanoi before we head to Halong Bay to soak up some...er...cloud.

Yes that's right, for the first time in 6 weeks it's not been bright sunshine from morning till evening. Terrible eh? You must feel really sorry for us... Phil's tan has already faded back to pasty and no doubt in another few days he'll be back to ghostly white and will have to start all over again.

We arrived in Hanoi on Saturday evening and our hotel is in the Old Quarter in the centre of the city. It's full of narrow streets and little alleyways and feels quite Parisian. The French influence is also apparent in the south of the city which has wide tree-lined boulevards and there's also a small lake (Hoan Kiem) about a minute from our hotel, which is rather nice, with a tiny pagoda in the middle.

So far we've managed to get around without serious injury, despite the interesting approach to traffic regulations round here, where crossing the road basically involves staring down a swarm of mopeds to see who will give in first and let you through. The roads do have traffic lights but we're starting to think that these are actually just some sort of festive lights or decorations, rather than anything that the traffic is supposed to pay attention too!

On Monday we went to prison. Hoa Lo Prison to be exact, also known as the Hanoi Hilton. It was originally built by the French colonists to imprison Vietnamese who opposed them, and later the Vietnamese used it for US prisoners-of-war. One POW was John McCain, the presidential candidate, who was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and held in the prison for 4 years. The prison museum has pictures of his capture and the pilot suit he was wearing. Other parts of the prison show how it looked under French rule, including one of the actual guillotines they used.

We decided to get a bit of culture on Monday evening and went to see the famous water puppets. Water puppets have been used to tell traditional Vietnamese folk tales for nearly 1000 years and there's a theatre dedicated to them in central Hanoi. The shows last about an hour and the puppet-masters stand in the water out of sight behind a screen and control the puppets with sticks that run under the water. It was well worth seeing, especially the fire-breathing dragons!

On Wednesday we failed to see inside Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum. Just like we failed to see Lenin in Moscow. In Moscow we'd mixed up the opening times but we knew we needed to get to see "Uncle Ho" before 11am so we got up early. Unfortunately though we got held up moving room in the hotel but still managed to get to the Mausoleum at 10 to 11. At least we thought we'd got to the Mausoleum...

We were about 50 feet away from the entrance, but for reasons known only to themselves, the guards were telling everyone they couldn't walk through the car park (despite other tourists milling around in said car park and no traffic whatsoever, except for 3 stationary buses) and instead had to walk round three sides of the outside of the square and enter by the other end of the car park. By the time we'd got all the way around, it was 5 past 11 and the Mausoleum was closed. Grrr.

We're leaving Hanoi tomorrow so have missed another chance to see a famous dead Commie. Darn it. Maybe we'll just wait till we get home and go to Highgate Cemetery to see where Karl Marx is.

(By the way, if you're wondering why we moved room, it's because the building opposite the hotel is being rennovated and at 11pm last night they drove up a big lorry and started launching huge bits of rubble into it from the top floor. The lorry was parked right under our window and came back three more times before it eventually left at 4am. Good morning Vietnam indeed!)

We're off to Halong Bay in the morning, which is about 3 hours drive from Hanoi and is meant to be very scenic. Though we're a bit worried by the afore mentioned cloud cover, which might make for some atmospheric if not very sunny photos. We're going for two nights and are spending the first night on a traditional Chinese "junk" style boat. The next day we plan to explore some of the islands and stay overnight on one of them before returning to Hanoi on Saturday afternoon.

Then on Saturday evening, we're getting the sleeper train to Sapa which is north west of Hanoi and close to the Chinese border. It's meant to be very scenic round there too, so we're planning to have a wander round the countryside before we cross into China on Tuesday morning.

Our current plan for China is to get the bus to Kunming in Yunnan province (just north of Laos) and then head north to Chengdu to visit some pandas, then east to Chongqing for a two or three day cruise down the Yangtze River to Yichuan. From Yichuan, the plan is to head to Shanghai for a few days then up to Beijing and the Great Wall. We've got till 26th March in China before we fly to Oz. The plan may well change as we make our way around but that's how it looks for now. Any recommendations, tips etc., let us know - we're still only halfway through the background of the China rough guide!

We're hoping we won't have any problems updating our journal from China but we know that the government has banned access to some foreign websites from within the country. We're hoping World Nomads isn't one of them, but if we go quiet in March, you'll know the reason why!

Love from Phil and Sarah x

P.S. Sarah had her haircut yesterday, by a non-English speaking Vietnamese hairdresser - so testing acting skills to the max! If it went wrong, she was ready to hide it with one of the big conical hats they all have round here, but the Vietnamese hairdresser seems to have done a good job. Not bad for 3 quid!

Vang Vieng and Vientiane

sarahandphil — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:08:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

Since leaving Luang Prabang, we’ve mainly spent our time floating down a river in tractor inner tubes drinking beer.

Perhaps that needs some explanation…

We left Luang Prabang on Tuesday morning and spent 5 hours on the bus winding through mountainous roads while trying to both take in the amazing scenery and hold in our breakfasts. We just about managed both. We were headed for Vang Vieng which is a small town about halfway between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the capital city.

views from the Luang Prabang - Vang Vieng road

Vang Vieng is a town squarely aimed at backpackers and if you’re not wearing baggy shorts, an “Ipood*” t-shirt and holding a big bottle of Beerlao then you might feel a bit out of place. So we fitted right in, obviously.

Vang Vieng

(*For those of you who’ve not been backpacking to Thailand or Laos recently, the Ipood t-shirt is one of about 20 t-shirts that are sold everywhere to backpackers on almost every street corner. Most of the t-shirts feature either Che Guevara or beer brands, the Ipood one has the outline of someone sitting on the loo listening to an Ipod. Hilarious, we’re sure you’ll agree. We’ve bought loads for you all when we get back! What do you mean you don’t want one?).

Anyway, Vang Vieng sits on the banks of the Nam Song River and its most popular attraction is tubing. For the uninitiated, this involves renting a tractor inner tube from a shop in the town then getting a tuk tuk ride about 4 miles up river and then jumping in the river and floating slowly down in your tube for 4 or 5 hours back to the town.

Preparing to go tubing having read the full instructions...

But that’s not all. The river has umpteen ramshackle, small wooden bars all along its banks specifically for the benefit of tubers to stop off for, ahem, refreshments.

We made our first stop after about 15 minutes (it was hard work you know) where the barman insisted on giving us both a free shot of Tiger whisky (fermented from rice, mmm) before he’d sell us a Beerlao each. The rascal. We sat dangling our feet in the water for about 10 minutes, then the techno music got too much for us so we decided to take our bottles with us and jumped back in.

The view from the tube and one of the launchers for jumping in the river

another way to get even wetter in Vang Vieng - slide in!

In the end we were quite restrained - we only stopped about 3 more times. Which we think is a fair few less than a guy we met at the finish who said he’d started at 11am with 3 mojito cocktails at the first bar (before he got in the river) and eventually made it back to the town at 6pm.

two Beerlao and a bag of pork scratchings please

The river was full of tubers, though occasionally a small powered longtail boat would breeze past carrying bemused looking older tourists trying to work out what they were witnessing. Towards the end, we also floated past about 10 water buffalo who'd come in the river for a bath - they didn't seem interested in our offer of a swift half though....

Sarah looking erm, relaxed, sharing the river with a herd of water buffalo!

After all that hard work, we needed a day to recover so we spent all of Thursday sat at a riverside bar in the town drinking fruit smoothies, taking in the sun and planning our Vietnam and China routes.

We got the bus to Vientiane on Friday, which was another 5 hours, but with much straighter roads this time, and spent the afternoon having a look round the city. Though it’s actually very small and little bigger than a mid-size town really. It’s also unfortunately lost most of its historical buildings due to various wars so there isn’t a great deal to see. We had a pleasant enough day looking around in the glorious sunshine but decided to book flights from here to Hanoi in Vietnam for Saturday evening.

Sarah in front of Vientiane's answer to the Arc de Triomphe. Apparently it was built from concrete that the US government had donated for building an airport!

Vientiane's presidential palace

By the riverside in Vientiane (Thailand is over on the other side)

We were debating whether to get the bus all the way to Hanoi but it’s supposed to take 24 hours (sometimes more) and we’ve heard quite a few stories that have put us off. One couple we met who’d travelled from Hanoi to Vientiane told us they were packed in on a rickety old bus with no air con and a driver who stopped in the middle of nowhere for a 5 hour sleep because he said he was tired! We’ve read similar tales on the web and the final straw was probably seeing an upturned lorry on our way from Viang Vieng to Vientiane that had come off the road and plunged 30 feet down into a field! So Vietnam Airways it is.

We’ve really enjoyed Laos and it’s definitely confounded some of our expectations, particularly that it’s been much easier to get around than we thought and that the towns and facilities are far from basic. No doubt it would have been a bit different if we’d headed into the north or the countryside but our short stay here has been a breeze and really good fun. The people in Laos are fantastic too. Very cheerful and laidback. This may be another place we come back to one day!

Hope all is well at home. Keep in touch and keep the comments and emails coming. Hope you're not getting bored of us yet!

Love to all.

Phil and Sarah x

Luang Prabang

sarahandphil — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Hi everyone,

We finally arrived in Luang Prabang in Laos on Thursday last week after our two-day slow boat trip down the Mekong river. It was a really atmospheric journey meandering our way down from northern Thailand through the misty jungle, and a pretty romantic way to spend Valentine’s day really!

It’s a very peaceful journey down the river for the most part, with just the occasional sleepy village, or fisherman to take photos of. The tranquility is only disturbed by the speedboats which also rip along the route. They take just half the time that the slow boat does (i.e. with no overnight stop), but since there are dangerous stretches of rapids and hidden rocks along the route, passengers are issued with compulsory life jackets and crash helmets… never a good confidence booster as you climb on board!

Seeing these (mostly Japanese) adrenaline junkies zoom by, soaking wet and gripping on to the sides of their boats for dear life made us feel really quite grateful to be whiling away the hours just looking around, reading books and playing scrabble. The slow boat really wasn’t that uncomfortable once you’ve bought your cushion (a bargain at 50p or so, and you get to keep it – could come in handy for those Chinese trains!). And some of the canny passengers that were first in the queue even got a ‘luxury seat’ – one of a few padded recliners that were apparently ripped straight out of aeroplanes… and we wonder why Lao Air has such a bad reputation….

Perhaps the best bit about the trip though was actually arriving in Luang Prabang. It’s the first place of any size that we’d seen for 48 hours and getting off the boat you do feel a bit like a nineteenth century jungle explorer, discovering somewhere unknown to western civilization and preparing yourself for whatever ‘the natives’ might be like … that is at least until the mist clears from your eyes and you see all of the pretty little avenues of sophisticated cafés, art galleries and quirky shops anyway…. In fact as we stopped at one of the cafes for a coffee and a catch up with the Bangkok Post, we were rather reminded of Stoke Newington Church Street! (will the Lonely Planet pick this up and finally publish a Stokey edition?!)

LP has actually recently been voted no. 1 city in the world to visit by Wanderlust magazine – a fact the Laos people seem to be being rather over-modest about – it was reported in the local paper that it had entered the top ten…(?!) And it is an amazing little town – preserved exceptionally well (it's UNESCO-listed) and apparently little changed since the French colonialists arrived. It certainly makes for a very picturesque setting, with old colonial-style houses with shutters and balconies (many of which are now very classy boutique hotels), set against gorgeous old buddhist temples and palm trees.

In summary, it’s the sort of place for mooching, drinking coffee and watching the world go by. So we’ve been doing lots of that! The local stuff, Lao coffee, is a big favourite – it’s incredibly strong, and thick like soup – oh, and keeps you awake all night – but we don’t care, we’re addicted! We’re actually thinking of throwing out some clothes to make space for a couple of kilos in our bags for home – so place your orders now those of you with young children!!

We’ve also got in our fair share of sightseeing, and have visited lots of the main temples. Our favourites so far have been Wat Xieng Thong (the oldest and really, really beautiful), That Chomsi (on top of a hill in the centre of the Old City, from where you can watch the seatless Lao Air planes take off over the jungle), and the excellently named Wat That – a useful landmark which hasn’t stopped making us giggle yet – “oh look, wat that, over there Phil!” We're easily amused...!

And we’ve also been on a couple of trips out of the town – one morning we took a little boat out to the Pak Ou caves, where thousands of Buddhas have been left in caves, we think (though we’re not sure – they have interestingly nuanced translations round here!) as offerings to keep the gods that look after the river happy.

We also spent a lovely afternoon at the Kouang Si waterfall, which falls 60 metres before spilling through a series of crystal blue pools. And we had fun pretending to be on the Krypton Factor trying to make our way across the top of the waterfall because we’d gone up the steps on the wrong side and had to get down the other way… all good fun and we only got our feet a little bit wet....

Other good things about Laos are:

* The people – who are making what they can from tourism in a very friendly and less ‘in your face’ way than some places we’ve been to so far

* The money – the currency is Kip and there are approx 17,500 of them to the pound. So we’re millionaires – hoorah! (see photo gallery also!)

* The beer – Beerlao – which is delicious, incredibly cheap, so helping us get some kip (of the sleep variety) after all that Lao coffee…

The Internet is also rather more advanced than we’d bargained for, and there are internet cafes everywhere (many even offering free wifi with your patisserie of choice…). So, with any luck we’ll be back online with another entry from our next stops in Laos, Vang Vieng and Vientiane, soon!

Until then,

Sarah and Phil x x

P.S. Book list – call for nominations!

This café lifestyle has meant that we’ve been getting through a lot of books recently, and as we’ve heard that the second hand bookshops in Vietnam are top notch, we’re going to try and use it as an opportunity to stock up. So, has anyone read anything really good recently? Anything considered –we’re trying to broaden our horizons after all…

Suggestions can be posted via the ‘comments’ option at the bottom of this entry, or emailed to us….. thanks!! (sarah__barton@hotmail.com / pn_shaw@hotmail.com)