It’s a Goa!

I was really dreading coming back. I was expecting everything to be costly, the roads to be terminally congested and the weather to be cold and rainy. I’ve been pleasantly surprised really…

…what’s changed since we’ve been away? If you want a telly it’s got to be a flat screen one and they cost rather more than the old fashioned variety. Hair-gel-and-thick-tie-knot ‘executives’ are driving Audis instead of BMWs…

…having experienced living out of a backpack and an old VW van we’re keeping our lives simple these days. We couldn’t have timed it better, to having paid off all our debts and learned to live a simple life puts us in a very good position to weather this recession.

I’ve been taking advantage of the combination of joblessness and broadband and got all our travel photos online for your perusal! http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwt/sets

For those of you that didn’t know… here’s a quick sum-up
After we earned all that money on the farm in Carnarvon we drove up the rest of the West Coast of Australia. At one point we did a bit of a convoy with some Italians and some Germans. Once we’d all parted company, we headed from […]

The challenge was set, to find jobs and save up $6000 (£2600) in six weeks so we could carry on North before the rainy season got into full swing and hopefully make it all the way to Melbourne in time for Christmas without having to work again.

To achieve this financial goal, we’d have to live very basically and work a lot of hours. Caravan parks would be a bit expensive so we’d have to try a combination of parking up in lay-bys and asking our employers if they’d kindly let us camp on their land (which would have the double benefit of saving us fuel from commuting). We’d only have to put up with these living conditions for six weeks so we reckoned it’d be difficult but achievable.

Meet Bessie, our 1973 VW campervan! We both hankered after one of these since before we met each other but in Britain they are so expensive and often rusty. We had to be satisfied with peering around beautiful VWs during our annual visits to Bug Jam festival.

Ha ha, perhaps you thought we were back in the UK. No, but we’re back on the net, and back in Western uncivilisation. A couple of paragraphs on what we’ve been up to since our last report back in April…
We headed back up to Malaysia, via the small colonial town of Melaka, which has a […]

We spent a very stressful week preparing Bessie and ourselves for our epic roadtrip. Just before I left work, Frank, my boss at the garage and I had given Bessie a full service and fixed a few little niggly faults. Tace and I also had to make some improvements to the interior so we’d be […]

In an experience quite opposite to any other taxi-related transaction we’d experienced so far, we had to grapple with drivers who didn’t want our business because they were ‘too busy’. Eventually we convinced a driver to take us but he was reluctant to take us to an ATM on the way to the hostel as he didn’t have time, so instead we paid using his amazing high-tech onboard credit card system which buggered up and ended up taking far longer than pulling over at an ATM somewhere. Singapore taxi drivers really are a different breed.

We opted for one of the well put together travel packages offered at Father’s and took a minibus ride to the Northeastern coast of Malaysia. The trip started with the loading of ourselves, several other backpackers and somehow, all our luggage, into a very nice and brand-spanking new minibus.