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.

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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 2 InFocus page for a look at even more photos related to the post below!**

We’re finally getting to another post… in our little bit of free time that we’ve had to work on the blog in the past few weeks Malcolm has been struggling with photo management and Jess has been typing away on her little iPad to make sure we had words to go with the pictures.

In this week’s adventures we left Auckland in search for more sunshine. After some debate we decided to stick to our original plan and head to the Coromandel Peninsula which worked out great as we were rewarded with a day of mostly sunny driving and a beautiful beach to hang out at all afternoon till sundown. After an exciting ‘alternate route’ drive to the other side of the Peninsula we arrived at our second NZ hostel (much nicer than the first) a little past 9pm. From there we enjoyed another beach day before a good drive to the Central North Island where we would visit the Hobbiton movie set and Waitomo glow worm caves. From there we headed back to Auckland to drop off Joe so he could continue his crazy adventure in New Orleans for Mardis Gras while Jessica and Malcolm headed north to Paihia for a quick adventure in the Bay of Islands and Northland. The last day we headed back to Auckland yet again for our 3rd NZ flight, this time back to the South Island and Te Anau. Below are daily summaries with a few pictures. See the link below for the weekly photo dump.

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 the Week 1 InFocus page for a look at even more photos related to the post below!**

Hello! We’re a little over 3 weeks into our travels and finally finding a little time to get some things done – mostly because we’re on a 3 hour ferry ride from Picton to Wellington – but more importantly it has internet that is more reliable than the hostels!

We arrived in Queenstown NZ, our first stop, on February 15th. We had originally planned to stay on the North Island for a while until our buddy Joe could meet up with us but Malcolm found a marathon in Queenstown that looked too crazy to pass up. So we switched our plans around, adjusted our final destination and set off! The marathon was three days after we landed, on Saturday the 18th – we figured the three days before would be enough to get over jet lag and somewhat acclimate to the high 70 degree weather as we were leaving a relatively cold winter in Seattle with temps consistently hovering around freezing.