After our two week road trip around New Zealand we returned to Australia for another week of fun down under. This time we arrived in Melbourne and decided to take a road trip on the Great Ocean Road which stretches for nearly 250 km along the southeast coast of the country. We rented a campervan through Jucy and had a blast. The van was a converted Toyota minivan which had the middle seats removed and replaced by a bench that…
New Zealand has a series of nine “Great Walks,” popular “tramping” (aka hiking + camping) trails that go through some of the most scenic parts of the country. My dad had heard great things about one of these hikes, the Routeburn Track, from his friend who is a New Zealand native so we decided to give it a try. Planning the Hike What is the Routeburn Track??! The Routeburn Track is located in the southwest of New Zealand, connecting Fiordland…
New Zealand is one of the places we’ve been most excited to visit; we heard great things about the people and expected the scenery to be awesome. It lived up to the hype and we had the most fun road trip here with my dad who flew to meet up with us for two weeks! What a treat! We rented a car from Rent-A-Dent in Christchurch (which is much nicer than it sounds) and spent two weeks exploring the South…
Our first afternoon in Sydney was spent wandering the neighborhood around the hostel and down to the harbor to get a view of the famous opera house and explore the city a little. For the first time in a long time, we ate at an Italian restaurant and we had noodles that weren’t fried with soy sauce. Our accommodation in Sydney was certainty an interesting place. The bed had a fitted sheet with cigarette burns and a top sheet with mold, which we…
We flew to Cairns, Australia for a chance to get up close and personal with the Great Barrier Reef. Cairns was a really lovely town with a beautiful waterfront “esplanade” (or promenade, as we would probably call it) and an amazing public pool. However, most visitors come to visit the Great Barrier Reef and this was of course the highlight of our visit! We signed up to visit the reef with Silverswift, one of the companies that offers diving tours. At…
We celebrated 100 days of traveling in beautiful Bali, Indonesia! We can’t believe we’ve been gone for over three months… time flies when you’re having SO MUCH fun! A scheduling snafu turned our 5 nights in Bali into only 3 nights. We accidentally confused some redeye flights for nights we’d have at the beach, only to realize later that we’d actually only given ourselves a super short visit. We stayed in the Seminyak beach area, one of the main tourist…
One of the best parts about traveling to Sri Lanka is it’s a pretty small country and it’s easy to get around. Trains, buses, and cars are just as much of the travel experience here as being in any one location and we loved sampling the many transit offerings. Train Train travel is the best and most scenic way to get around Sri Lanka. There are routes connecting Colombo to the beaches along the southwest coast and separate lines connecting…
When Jen left us after our visit to Angkor Wat, we had to decide what to do next. We had about 2 weeks unaccounted for before heading to Australia and New Zealand. We thought about continuing on to see other parts of Cambodia and toyed with the idea of heading to Malaysia for some scuba diving. However, we kept hearing great things about Sri Lanka and decided to get out of Southeast Asia to experience something different. We are so glad we ended…
We spent 4 days in Siem Reap to check out Angkor Wat and the other temples in the area. After our few days of temple hopping in Bagan, Myanmar, our favorite stop of the trip to date, we were excited to see what the famous temples in Cambodia had to offer. The best way to get around the temples is by tuk tuk (pictured below). It cost us about $20 USD per day to hire someone to take us around. Before…
We loved Hoi An. Here were our top favorite activities: Food Food Tour By far our favorite part of Hoi An was the food. We did a food tour on our first day which was excellent. We were led by Pearl, a local who has a passion for food and was genuinely excited to show us all of the foods of Hoi An and the proper ways to eat them. We tried a total of 10 different items over the course of…