Meet a Random Traveller #21

Posted on 28. Aug, 2010 by Poi in Meet A Random Traveller

Welcome to round 21 of ‘Meet a Random Traveller’. Although we have hit the  road now, we are still looking for new random travellers as we will mix them up between bloggers and “normal” travellers! So this week it’s a blogger….

Random Traveller #21

Who are you?

Hello! We’re Rob and Kat, an English couple who have packed our backpacks and decided to go on a year-long adventure. With 365 days to fill with fun, food and some fantastic people (so far!) we left those green and rainy lands in April 2010 and have been keeping our blog, http://blogthreesixfive.blogspot.com , ever since.

Here fellow travelers and worried relatives can follow our adventures through India, South East Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Fiji, The Cook Islands and a tiny bit of West coast America…or, at least, until the money runs out!

Rob & Kat

Don’t you have a home to go to?
We do…but London isn’t going anywhere is it? After graduating in June 2009 we decided to forget the career path (at least for the moment) and opt for the road less traveled. Kat’s been chanting “backpacks not careers” sporadically in an almost religious manner for about 3 months now.

Where have you been?
On this trip we have traveled around most of India; which was as colourful, as vibrant and as widely varied as we had hoped – we even managed to get ourselves into some Bollywood movies! Kat landed a role that required her to lie on a sun lounger next to “Tamil Nadu’s George Clooney” (who was wearing tiny shorts and a dressing gown throughout) and answer the phone for him. Rob got to sit in his pants on the same sun lounger and swear at a laptop. It was terribly glamorous.

We were in India for almost three months and despite racking up a good few thousand km on the train network we didn’t see it all so we’ll be heading back at some point in the distant future to do the northern states.
From Kerala we flew to Han Oi in Vietnam and cruised all over this beautiful country, coming very close to the end of our visas before crossing over to Cambodia. We’ve spent the last few weeks really enjoying our jungle / temple / river adventures in Cambodia.

kat does bollywood

Where are you heading to?
Tomorrow, in fact, we are jumping on a bus and heading into the southern tip of Laos. We’ll be meeting up with a few friends on Don Det, a super-relaxing island in Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands). Not that we exactly need to relax after four months of backpacking bliss…

What’s your favorite place so far?

Can we cheat and have two because we’re two people, please? Thanks NPTB! Our first has to be the BLESS Nursery and Primary School that we stopped and helped out at in Tamil Nadu, India. The children were amazing; so happy and so keen to learn and the staff were the most generous and welcoming people we’ve met so far. It was a truely humbling experience. (full details at bless nursery and primary)

Our other top choice for sheer beauty has to be Halong Bay (Vietnam). We stayed on Cat Ba Island which meant we sailed around the Lan Ha islands; they’re a little further away from Halong Bay proper so we avoided all of the day-trippers from Han Oi. We spent the day taking lots of photos, kayaking, diving off the top of our boat and swimming to deserted white sand beaches. It was magical.

Rob with BLESS students

What’s in your bag that you are yet to touch?

In a pre-leaving, Amazon-based shopping spree (panic), Kat bought South East Asia on a Shoe String. Rob dutifully carried it’s hefty weight (it’s like the Bible, but bigger) around while we were in India, opening it only to find that it was a 2003 edition, and so, basically too old to be of practical use. We haven’t used it since…pretty sure it’s still lurking in the bottom of Rob’s bag though…

A big thanks to Rob and Kat for agreeing to take part in this.

Fancy being Random Traveller #22? Contact us.

Tags: Meet a Random Traveller