Starting a travel blog is something that I had wanted to do for a long time.  I have found that reading through travel blogs has been invaluable in helping me to plan my trips overseas.  They have also given me a lot of in depth information on the places I wanted to visit, which has helped me enormously. Often travel blogs have give a much more honest description of a place, compared to the usual descriptions in travel books that call every place “awesome” and “amazing”.  I tell you that being pestered by 10 different hawkers every time I went to sit down for a coffee in Ho Chi Min City got tiring pretty fast.  Even tips on how to get from ‘Obscure place A’ to ‘Obscure place B’ have been incredibly useful and not what you would usually find in your average travel book.  Saying that, I always take a copy of the relevant Lonely Planet book with me when I travel as I enjoy reading the brief histories of each place I visit and they provide useful maps for the big cities.  So in this blog I promise to be honest about my experiences, including both the ups and downs.  Like what to do if you get bitten by hundreds of bed bugs?! Definitely not an experience to put on my list of highs from Myanmar.  The answer – wash everything thoroughly and hang everything in the sun for at least 24hrs.

One of the biggest obstacles in planning a trip overseas is deciding on an appropriate budget.  With my trip through the USA and Central America, I spent hours trying to figure out how much money we needed to save in order to travel through several countries for about 4 months.  One of the most important things to include in your budget is the big ticket items like getting your dive ticket in Honduras or a helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon, and of course travel insurance.  So I have tried to post the costs of travel to each of the places I’ve visited.

I originally saw my blog as a resource for fellow travellers but I have found that it now provides me with an incredible library of information and pictures to look back on and reminisce. I hope that you get has much enjoyment out of reading as I did writing!