We first met some Easy Riders while waiting at a bus stop in Danang. Two men with faces as worn as the black, insignia-inscribed leather jackets they wore roared over to us, pulling their shiny, black machines to a stop: “We are Easy Riders – wherever you are going, we’ll take you,” they said, flashing confident, tobacco-stained smiles in our direction.
08 April, 2014 /
The five-hour bus journey up to Dalat was pretty standard for Asia; uncomfortable, overloaded and bumpy. The air visibly cooled as we climbed higher into the central highlands and the scenery morphed from seashores and sand dunes to hills and forests. It was the week before Christmas but it certainly hadn’t felt like it as we’d sweated in the fierce heat of Mũi Né and strolled along the beach-front. So, I was feeling much more festive when we arrived in Dalat, zipping our jumpers against the nippy evening air and inhaling the scent of pine trees on the breeze.
05 April, 2014 /
Travelling, by its very nature, can be extremely disorientating and leave you longing for the familiarity of home. I’ve been the first to admit that living our lives in a constant stream of new places this past year has resulted in some powerful bouts of homesickness. However, what I haven’t mentioned yet is that somehow we’ve unexpectedly managed to carve a sort of home-on-the-road for ourselves here in Thailand.
30 March, 2014 /
Hoi An is a beautiful place, full of old yellow buildings with wooden shutters, elaborate red-gold temples and decorative assembly halls filled with statues of dragons and birds. The ancient colonial port is preserved as a UNESCO world heritage site and has plenty of rustic buildings to explore. Trees line its wide streets, which feel curiously empty in the daytime due to a motor vehicle ban; all you have to worry about is dodging bicycles and rickshaws as you wander through the city centre. In the evenings the roads and riverside restaurants are lit up with colourful lanterns strung between lampposts and Vietnamese women sell candles to float down the river past the ancient Japanese bridge and creaky cargo boats which sit atop the black water.
27 March, 2014 /
Stepping off the overnight train at Hué station, we weaved our way through the crowds of persistent taxi drivers to find our free hotel pick-up. The sky was colourless and leaden but at least it wasn’t raining, which is apparently a common occurrence in this ancient city. Sore-eyed and groggy from the long journey we gazed half-heartedly out of the car window at the grey river running alongside us, its surface merging with the flat, dull sky above. I sighed. From the looks of things, Hué was definitely no match for the glitz and bustle of Hanoi, the city we’d loved and left behind.
24 March, 2014 /

The entire morning of my birthday was spent on a coach battling through choked roads to Halong Bay.  One thing’s for sure, I never expected to be living this kind of uncertain, transient, exhilarating lifestyle when I turned 30. Like most people, I thought I’d have submitted to societal norms and gotten myself weighed down in responsibility with a mortgage and a steady job by this point. Instead, Andrew and I have only each other and the possessions we carry on our backs and our once plump savings account is now starting to look pretty lean.

21 March, 2014 /
We caught our first glimpses of Hanoi as we sped through the evening darkness towards our hotel. Immediately I was captivated by the city and its leafy streets stuffed with people, illuminated by street lamps connected by thick ribbons of tangled electrical wires. I watched the towering skyscrapers and colonial houses go by and longed to step into the inviting orange glow of the cafes and explore the snaking laneways. By the time we reached our hotel, Hanoi had already stolen a piece of my heart. Although we spent just six days in the city altogether, Hanoi was without a doubt one of our Vietnam highlights.
18 March, 2014 /
One of the things we can’t quite get used to in Asia is the corruption which forms an ordinary part of everyday life here. From knock-off goods to rigged taxi meters and other tourist scams, travelling is a whole different ball game here compared to in regulation-crazy Europe. While we’re now resigned to the fact that we’ll be charged tourist prices everywhere we go, we’ve found that making overland border crossings in South-East Asia presents some of the most frustrating examples of corruption.
15 March, 2014 /
It’s been a year since we turned our lives upside down and left the UK. Those twelve short months have felt like a lifetime in which we’ve learnt, seen and achieved so much. It’s the first year out of thirty that we’ve spent away from the country we call home – a mere blink of the eye - yet throughout this year I’ve been unexpectedly struck by powerful waves of longing for home.
03 March, 2014 /
After our peaceful stay in Four Thousand Islands (minus the stomach aches), we had some time to kill before we were allowed back into Thailand. According to our Lonely Planet, the quiet, colonial town of Pakse seemed like the ideal place to hang out for a while before hopping over the border – how wrong we were.
27 February, 2014 /