Thailand
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February 29th: Remember The Last One?
A post this morning by Lynette at In the net! was our prompt for these thoughts today… Where were you last time we had a 29th day of February? Cast your mind back. The news channels were by now full of stories emanating from a city called Wuhan, which most of us had never heard of before, about a killer virus, with all sorts of side issues including city lockdowns and the consumption of live bats, to name just two. Yet really, even then, on “Leap Year Day” 2020, we had no idea of how radically the world’s entire landscape was to change in the next three weeks. On this…
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Countdown To Rio
It’s that time again. Never mind counting the days, we’re just arriving at the stage where we’ll be counting the hours until we lock the doors behind us and head to Heathrow to start our next great adventure. The exotic, vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro awaits, one of the world’s greatest carnivals about to begin, romantic sounding locations like Copacabana, Ipanema and Corcovado soon to be on our doorstep. It’s a little over a week until the journey begins. After waking up on New Year’s Day many thousands of miles from home in each of the last two years, this feels like a late start for us and the…
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Michaela’s Favourite Photographs: #3 Island Sunset
Klong Nin, Koh Lanta, Thailand, 2020. Of all the many wonderful sunsets we’ve witnessed across the world, the island of Koh Lanta produced probably the best. Michaela has not enhanced the colour on this photo in the slightest, this is unedited – it really was this colourful. As we sat on the sands watching the sky move through its amazing palette, Michaela captured this stunning moment.
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Travel Stories: Camels And Khaled
Having already handed over the money for the camel ride, we weren’t unduly worried by the fact that Khaled was now negotiating a fee with the animals’ handler and obviously taking a cut for himself, what concerned us far more was that Khaled appeared in the midst of a deal with a boy aged about eleven. “Come” said Khaled, “we are ready.” As we mounted the camels, Khaled was clearly giving the boy directions back to our camp, which, given the expanse of empty desert between our current location at the Lawrence Spring and Eid’s camp several miles away, was another worry. But in the flick of a camel’s eyelash…
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Markets: Look Away Now (Maybe)
Now, we know this set of photographs won’t meet with everyone’s approval, so just a quick warning: if you find pictures of animals in markets offensive or revolting, you might want to look away. But the truth is, markets across the world are fascinating places, and part of that fascination is in seeing things you wouldn’t see back home, even if some do have a certain yuk quality. Like lots of travellers we seem to have amassed a rather large collection of market shots, but these are some of the more “out there” ones from our archives…. Live eels, Riga…. Edible bugs, Oaxaca…. Delicious chocolate drink (despite appearances!), Ocotlan, Mexico……
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The Difference A Year Makes
It’s not always easy to stay positive and optimistic during this COVID lockdown, a mood not helped by an extremely dreary English winter as our weather does its absolute best to justify its bad reputation. Whilst some parts of the UK have witnessed significant snowfall, our South East corner has been deluged with what seems like incessant rain, borne out by this detail: January brought 151mm of rainfall when the historical average for that month is 50mm. Three times normal, and it feels like it, too. Many days have been simply too wet to take a walk, and the countryside is now so saturated that the fields and footpaths are…
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Photographic Memories #10
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #10: Family History Like the poor soul remembered on this war grave, our surname is Sharman; this is the grave of my father’s cousin, Roland. The plaque is one of many hundreds of memorials in the war cemetery at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, built to commemorate those poor souls who perished during construction of the infamous Death Railway as they laboured as Prisoners Of War in…
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Photographic Memories #4
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #4: Thai Sunset Capturing a sunset on camera is something every traveller has done numerous times, but of all our sunset photos, this is probably our favourite. Michaela hasn’t done any doctoring of this photograph, not even enhanced any colouring, what you see in the photograph is exactly how it was. Just to make it even more special, we were drinking some very strong and very…
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Making Roots And Planning Routes
It’s fair to say that we’re getting a bit restless. Here in Side it’s a little bit like becoming becalmed at sea, eager to press on with this voyage and even more eager to make more voyages in the future. Settling into a single place for an extended stay was always on our agenda, but probably not for several years yet. It’s an experience we’ve added to our repertoire rather earlier than intended, but then our travel in 2020 has been a very different shape from the original picture. Until COVID intervened and blew our plans apart, our intention after retiring last Christmas was to travel for around four months…
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Escaping COVID: Our Next Move
Our regular readers will know that we retired at the end of 2019 to pursue our long held dream of full time travel. Unfortunately the obvious intervened and we were forced to abandon our trip after just 7 weeks of what should have been endless exploration. UK lockdown followed. As the slight easing of restrictions started, we took full advantage of the so called travel corridors and have just returned from 5 weeks touring Croatia, which was more than fabulous. We’re now nearing the end of the 14-day quarantine which was imposed just a few days before our return from that trip. These 14 days have naturally felt pretty dull…
