beyond 9 to 5

By Rob, While housesitting at Hope Island, Queensland, our itchy feet began to return, along with the need for some dodgy, cramped hostel rooms again. We started to plan our next adventure while taking a rest in Oz and ended up choosing Asia. After all it was the closest place on our extensive list. (Besides …

by Liz 1. The weather: long days, gorgeous fiery sunsets and intense thunderstorms. The climate in Africa doesn’t do things by halves. During the day we could be scorching and melting in the midday sun, only to be woken up by wild thunder and lightning in the middle of the night. The clear, non-polluted sky …

By Rob. We booked three nights at the Broadwater Keys hotel in Labrador, on the Gold Coast, to tide us over till the housesitting. This was another motel room with a kitchenette. We made copious use of the delivery menus, especially Pancakes in Paradise; a place from heaven that would deliver hot pancakes any way …

By Rob. Our journey eventually took us from Doha to Melbourne, Australia, oh my god that was a journey, I mean how many films can you watch in one sitting, I managed at least three, and Liz flicked between films and Boyslife/Westzone tunes. It would have been nice to sleep but we wanted to convert …

By Liz. We must have spent hours deciding the best route through to Australia, calculating stopping time in the Middle East, and of course, what it would cost.  Eventually we booked our tickets from Cape Town to Melbourne (New South Wales) as this seemed to be the cheapest route. However, that meant a whopping 17hr …

By Liz. Arriving in Johannesburg, after four months of travelling in underdeveloped countries, was a strange form of culture shock for us both. The city is renown for it’s high rates of crime and there is certainly poverty on the outskirts, but to us it seemed very civilised in comparison! All around the main city’s …

Our 7 shots in the travel-bloggers game… We’ve decided to play along in HostelBookers 7 ‘Super’ Shots: and although the aim of the game is to be ‘tagged’ by another travel blogger to play, we don’t actually have any blogging friends!  So we’ve bravely taken it on ourselves to participate in their latest photo project… friends or …

By Rob. Lusaka offered very little in the way of sight-seeing or excitement apart from having a very cheap Nando’s. We knew that the city was little more than a stopover for getting where we needed to be – Livingstone. We inevitably ended up booking another bus journey for the trip but were pleased when …

By Liz. It was extremely hard to tear ourselves away from Matemwe Retreat.  We actually considered staying another couple weeks and blowing our whole budget – but then what?  So instead we convinced ourselves that what we were really still yearning for was ‘over landing’ Africa; getting off the beaten track and crossing country borders …

By Rob. We managed to get a few more days around the coast of Zanzibar before heading to Matemwe, the village that was going to be host to our wedding ceremony. We were a few days earlier than we intended but we felt we had done enough of Stonetown (or was it that we were …