Matthew’s Website

On my final day (Monday) in Shanghai I first had to buy some new shoes. My “bargain” shoes from New Zealand which cost NZ$25 (£8) turned out to be not so great and they were still so wet in the morning that I had to borrow the orange plastic flip flops from my hostel to [...]

On Wednesday I caught the MRT out towards the Jurong bird park. First I had some lunch in the mall at Boon Lay – the far end of the east west line. I had a chicken curry noodles. This was really tasty and also pretty damn spicy -a nice random dish. It also wasn’t too [...]

On my first full day in KL I went to the Islamic Arts museum. I did this by public transport which involved first taking the monorail from Times Squsre shopping centre to KL Sentral station which went past a lot of interesting architecture.
From KL station I then took a damp (probably from the air conditioning) [...]

On Wednesday I took a tour from my hostel to the Taj Mahal. We left early at 7:30am and made our way on the 5 hour bus journey to Agra. This was fairly uneventful if slow. I chatted to an Indian from Mumbai (Bombay) who spoke excellent English on the journey.
After arriving in Agra we [...]

After a lazy morning I went out on Tuesday afternoon to see some of the sites of New Delhi. First I went to Safdarjung’s tomb which is a beautiful building a bit like the Taj Mahal. After having a wander around the beautiful gardens and after seeing this I headed to the excellent Indra Gandhi [...]

So I flew into Delhi on Friday evening and then went straight to bed and got up moderately late on Saturday morning after checking my email and breakfast I headed out for the day. Unfortunately first I got waylaid by touts including one with fake government ID but no harm came of me aside from [...]

I was having an interesting coversation with the mother of the Japanese family I was staying with in Tokyo about marriage. She was talking about how the divorce rate in Japan is rising. She was shocked when I mentioned that the divorce rate in England was currently approximately 50% (update: just checked the government figures, [...]

After a long coach journey I arrived into Franz Josef on Tuesday evening. That evening I went for a few drinks and learnt that the town is completely dependent on tourists. It’s population is only 100 but swells to approximately 3000/day in the summer which is absolutely massive. I also found that in appreciation the [...]

Over the past couple of days I’ve been busy here in San Pedro. Firstly two days ago I went to the valley of the moon. The valley of the moon is a deserty valley that is around 10km from San Pedro, as it is so close I decided to avoid the tour companies and go [...]

Firstly a note. This is a double post and the story on the rest of the Sacred Valley was posted at the same time.
After breakfast at the train station we got ok the train. The train didn’t have much legroom (little more than the bus yesterday) but we did get a window positioned next to [...]