I’m baaaack! I know it’s been radio silence for a long time on this travel blog, but that’s because Lionel and I haven’t been traveling. We’ve been settled on Koh Tao now for a while. This month was actually our 5 year anniversary of starting our PADI Open Water scuba diving course. In December this year, it’ll be our 5 years of actually living and working on Koh Tao as dive professionals! Crazy how fast the time has gone. I’ve slithered back out of the water that is now my home to talk about something that has radically changed my life recently. The thing that I believe is an essential…
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Money Matters in South East Asia
Money is obviously important everywhere and anywhere, but especially when you’re moving from one place to another, and changing currencies. Here are a few things we discovered about money as we traveled.
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Should I Book Accommodation Ahead?
Should I Book Accommodation In Advance? No – often you can negotiate a cheaper price when you are face to face wth the owners. No – you can see what the room is actually like before you pay. How clean, how bright, what’s provided, etc. Yes – often you are guaranteed a booking, though not always.. We are in SE Asia after all. Yes – popular, low cost, very clean, highly rated Trip Advisor places may be booked out, especially in high season. Our Experiences Our first stop was Malaysia and I was feverishly looking up TripAdvisor, hostelbookers.com, hostelworld, booking.com, Airbnb, etc. for cheap but clean accommodation. I was going…
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Why We Traveled, and Why You Should Too!
We got to a cross-roads in our relationship and in our lives, about two years ago. We had good jobs and a bit of money. We could have invested the next few years climbing up our career ladders, purchased a house and a lengthy mortgage to go with it, or we could spend our money and go traveling. 100 points for guessing which path we chose! We did jump into it not really knowing what to expect, but one year later, we’ve come to realise we made the right choice. If you’re wondering if and why you should travel, here’s some of the reasons that made it worthwhile for us.…
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Image Size Management
For the first few months of our blog, we used to upload images in their native size, which is 4K. This is rather insane and I have now decided that it is not something we want to do for several reasons: 1. Upload & download bandwidth cost 2. Upload time 3. Readers really don’t need 4K images The first step was to stop the madness. So, since late August we have been batch re-sizing our images using the Photo Editor app for Android. We copy the images we have selected to add to the blog into an upload/ folder. Then we batch process them to a maximum width or height…
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Six Months is Up! Yikes!
Just renewed our travel insurance with World Nomads. Can’t believe we are only two days away from the end of our original 6 month cover! It seems so long ago that we were reading up about different travel policies and then finally, last minutely, deciding on the Explorer Package with World Nomads. Also, a Happy 26th Anniversary to my parents for on the day our insurance policy is renewed!
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Data Management – Photo Backup While Traveling
When we set off on our several months long trip to south-east Asia, I always expected us to take A LOT of photos. I had heard horror stories of people that lose or have their SD cards stolen during the last week of traveling, loosing all of their photos. This was not a risk I was willing to take, so I planned for some redundancy. After just over 5 months, naturally the megabytes are mounting up and we are getting low storage warnings on our TF700 Asus tablet, Emma’s iPhone and sometimes even the camera’s SD cards. In total that is 16GB (iPhone), 64GB (tablet) and 64GB (2x 32GB SD…
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Regrouping in Ho Chi Minh City
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Off the Beaten Track, my arse!
We like to think we’re non-tourists. That we’re getting off the beaten track, but no way Jose. There’s complaints about the hot weather, the need for air-conditioned shopping centres, the constant hunger for the big brand, fast food joints. And that’s all from Lionel. And me. But we’ll get better at this.
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Got me some Travel Pants But Not the Elephant Pants
You can spot them a mile away. The traveller who just started travelling, and thinks they’re a traveller, but really, they’re just the weirdo in hippy, flow-y pants. Treading the path that thousands have treaded before. Usually they come in a repetitive elephant motif, and can be bought for a buck or two at the market. The funniest is when you see friends traveling together in matching pants, but various colours. Mine? No elephants, but still ridiculous. My main aim? To not wear butt-cracking shorts in religious or more conservative areas in SE Asia.
