Travel Blog

Bangkok has become one of my favourite cities and after three days here I feel my senses have been fully assaulted. I still wouldn't say I know the city even after three visits but I'm getting better at not getting lost.  On Monday Dom, the tuktuk driver delivered me to…

I had one last morning in Perth before heading for the airport and a flight to Bangkok. Something I didn't have time to do last time was Kings Park which is one of the main attractions of the city. I left the hotel at 7:30 on a beautiful sunny Sunday…

Astrid and I debarked and joined the world's longest taxi line. I was remarkably calm about it. Katy would have been proud of me. In fact I was so calm she probably would have taken me straight to a medical centre for tests. I was finally free of the ship…

Our final port call on this trip was Port Arthur and what a lovely place it was. Just a little further round the coast from Hobart is one of Australia's eleven World Heritage Sites. Not for the first time, the historical significance of Port Arthur centres around its function as…

We were due to stop at Burnie in Tasmania as out first stop however the wave height and wind speed meant aborting that plan and heading straight for Hobart. An unscheduled sea day was actually most welcome giving me time to recover from my cold a tad more. Medical professionals…

Melbourne has become one of my favourites cities and I was determined to be well enough for a mooch round. Astrid had gone on a tour and Ben had left early to go to the casino. Regrettably Ben asked me to come and join him and even more regrettably I…

Perhaps I exaggerated the effectiveness of German nursing as the MF took a turn for the worse. I decided that a day on the ship would be best although watching Tess of the D'urbervilles may not have been the wisest choice. I would rank it near the top of a…

As they say "never judge a city by its container port" except in the case of Adelaide. In Perth they could sell condos and charge a premium for "container port views" but alas in Adelaide they could not. This is the last of the five big million plus cities in…

Albany, Right in the southwest corner of Australia is a small former whaling town called Albany with a modest population of 37,000. Albany has a different climate to the rest of Western Australia with much more cloud and rain. I can't tell you much more because I didn't get off…

The ship docked at Fremantle which is an urban area within greater Perth. Well what a lovely surprise Fremantle was. Even the container port could be described as 'rather fetching". We stopped here for an overnighter and thought we'd do Perth first and Fremantle the following morning. Perth is the…

The low expectations theory certainly worked yesterday in Exmouth as we resumed the Australia circumnavigation. With only 2,500 residents Exmouth is very small and I was reliably informed that the nearest McDonald's restaurant was a mere 800km away in Geraldton. In many ways it was the real Australia or what…

We arrived at 10am on the island of Bali which is a huge tourist destination for Australians. Again located in the Lesser Sunda island chain Bali has a population approaching 4.5m and the island is ten times the size of Ibiza. Although Indonesia is a Muslim country (87%) Bali is…

Komodo Island lies just 8 degrees below the equator and is famous for its large lizards but it could be equally famous as the sweatiest place on earth. It is one of the 17,508 islands that make up Indonesia which in days gone by was the Dutch East Indies. Komodo…

We had three days sailing after leaving Cairns, first through the Barrier Reef before rounding Cape York at the top of Australia, through the Torres Strait which separates Australia and New Guinea, over the top of the Gulf of Carpentaria, through the Arafura Sea and finally arriving in Darwin. I…

The night before we arrived in Cairns, Ben and I found ourselves in the piano bar with the pianist Barry from Boston. Ben volunteered to sing the male part of a song from Phantom of the Opera and Jules (middle aged woman from the UK) volunteered to do the female…

October 25th marked the midpoint of this trip and also the 2nd anniversary of my travels and the very first blog in Hong Kong. We sailed into the Whitsunday Islands early and anchored near to Hamilton Island. The Whitsundays are made up of 74 islands and lie in the heart…

Brisbane is the capital of Queensland and the third largest city in Australia with 2.4m people. Named after the river on which it stands on which in turn was named after a Scotsman called Sir Thomas Brisbane who was the governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825.  The…

Sailing towards Sydney during our last night of the first segment of this cruise, the seas became quite rough and as a consequence I awoke at 1am and couldn't get back to sleep. This was the roughest night we'd had and being at the very back of the ship made…

The first of two stops in New Caledonia was on the island of Mare pronounced mar-ray which is the second largest of the four Loyalty Islands. It is also one of the least visited islands in the Pacific. James Cook was the first European to discover the islands in 1774…

Vanuatu is an archipelago of 83 islands in the South Pacific with a total population of 281,000. We stopped at the capital, Port Vila on the island of Efate. In 2007 Vanuatu was voted as the happiest place to live. Local status is decided by number of pigs you have…