Ready to say goodbye to so-so weather, we left the east coast of Australia and flew west to Perth, a city that is so remote from the majority of inhabited Australia that many Aussies never make it here! It’s a land full of sun and sandy beaches, a stop on the World Surfing League, and home to an amazing wine region!

Hello! We’re still alive and well, just now finally getting back to some updates for the blog. Despite what the posts might indicate we have been quite a few places in the last 5 months and are actually back in Australia – but more on that later. In this weekly post we are wrapping up our time in Queensland before heading to Sydney!

For those of you who have not been reading the full posts (we completely understand) you may have missed our photos page from previous weeks which has heaps more photos than are on each of these posts. Head to our Google Photos album for a collection of underwater pictures from our time on the reef. More pictures coming soon!

It’s been a wild month since our last post. We’ve gone from finishing up our short tour of Vietnam and SE Asia to spending just over two weeks trekking the Himalaya in Nepal, then several days witnessing the extreme opulence of Dubai, and are now 5 days into a month of exploring South Africa in Stockholm at the tail end of a three week Scandinavian road trip. This post is only possible thanks to the majority of the pictures being sorted and organized while still in Vietnam. The internet was yet again incredibly slow and unreliable throughout all of Nepal and is turning out to be the same through most of South Africa so bear with us on future posts as well. We hate to sound like we’re complaining about internet all the time but it really is amazing how far behind so many of these countries are with something we in the US take for granted.

In this weekly post we continue our time in Melbourne before heading up to Cairns to jump on a boat for 3 nights on the Great Barrier Reef, searching for Nemo, Dory and all their friends.

Update: **For those of you who have not been reading the full posts (we completely understand) you may have missed our photos page which has heaps more photos than are on this post. Head to our Week 4 InFocus page for a look at even more photos related to the post below!**

Hey, we’re kind of on a roll with this posting thing! It really does help when you finally find some decent internet, so thank you Cambodia and Vietnam for your awesome budget hotels with the best WiFi we’ve had in ages. A quick update of where we actually are in our travels: we just arrived to a rainy Hoi An on Vietnam’s central coastline, just south of Da Nang and we’ll be here for the next 4 nights. No promises on more blog posts, but it COULD happen… just don’t hold your breath and sign up for our email notifications for new blog posts if you haven’t already (or if Malcolm hasn’t already signed you up without you knowing!)

Also, check out our new map page so you can see which cities we’ve visited and where we have current plans to head next!

In this week’s adventures we continue our travels north, leaving the South Island one last time for a long drive from the bottom of the North Island to Auckland for the last time on this trip. At the end of the drive we’ll catch yet another flight out of Auckland, saying good bye to New Zealand, as we continue searching for warm and sunny Southern Hemisphere weather in Australia, the next new-to-us country,  in our list.

Update: **For those of you who have not been reading the full posts (we completely understand) you may have missed our photos page which has heaps more photos than are on this post. Head to our Week 3 InFocus page for a look at even more photos related to the post below!**

We realize it’s been a while but time is flying by! We are now on to our second continent and second city in Asia: Chiang Mai second country in Asia: Laos and hopefully on to Siem Reap, Cambodia later today. We have been working on updates but internet is still that unreliable, or reliably slow and unreliable, however you want to look at it, that we are just now getting to our third post. Oddly enough the most reliable and high speed internet we’ve had lately (which is why this post is getting out) is from the tiny Luang Prabang International Airport where we are waiting for our flight that was unbeknownst to us delayed 3 hours. Side note about travelling in Asia: flights are often delayed or cancelled and they will not contact you for either. You have to either continually check online (if their website works), call in before heading to the airport (if their lines aren’t busy and they’re actually in the office that day or hour), or simply show up at the airport to find out whether or not you’ll be on your scheduled flight. A definite difference from flying in the US or Europe but then again the Asian airlines seem to treat their customers a bit better after they’ve boarded (looking at you United Airlines) – we even got an unexpected free meal on our 1.5 hour flight from Singapore to Bangkok!

In this week’s adventures we left Auckland, yet again, to revisit the South Island and actually get outside of Queenstown. New Zealand can hardly be done in one month and you’d be very hard pressed to do either island well in a single month. With a limited amount of time planned for New Zealand in our overall ‘plan’ we tried to pick out a few areas that would be a good tasting of what the South Island has to offer for when we come back! In the last post we landed back in Queenstown and drove south to Te Anau, our home base for a couple of days exploring the Milford ‘Sound’ area. Here is the rest of the South Island and our trip back north to Auckland before leaving for Australia.