We were pretty sad to leave our friends and BA behind, but fortunately we were on our way to the perfect place to drown our sorrows. We began on the bus with red wine and champagne. Our very polite bus attendant approached us just after we left the terminal and questioned us in Spanish. Unfortunately we couldn’t understand, and upon my polite ‘¿Hablas inglés?’ he said ‘A little… let’s play bingo’. A minute later he handed us a bingo card, grabbed a microphone and off we went!

We arrived not so fresh at 8.30am on Wed and jumped in a taxi to our B&B. Unable to check in for a couple of hours we stepped out to check out the area and see if we could find a wine bar. Unfortunately the town was still pretty sleepy, so we had a coffee and some medialunas and looked around for a wine tour for the next day. Later that day we found a great place and booked on a bit of a posh tour, and as a bonus they gave us a voucher for a free glass of wine! Happy at last, we made our way to The Vines of Mendoza and ate cheese, drank wine and chatted to the staff who were all too happy to begin our vino education.

We dragged ourselves out of bed the following morning, ready to be picked up at 9am to start ‘tasting’. Already in the bus when we arrived were Bill and Mark from DC. Lovely guys who had already done a tour with the same company only two days before, a good sign! Mark is a Spanish teacher so it was pretty interesting having him around. Soon after, we picked up Walter, a Brasilian guy who was VERY into his wines. Needless to say, we felt a little like children amongst the grown ups! However, I was to discover towards the end of the day that Bill and Mark didn’t take it too seriously, when I commented that one of the reds smelled like washing up liquid and they giggled along with me!

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So, as many of you will already know… we got married.

We decided quite a while ago that we wanted to get married, but we just weren’t quite sure how or when. We thought maybe we’d do it when we got back to London when we finished travelling, but we weren’t too keen on the stress of organising a big wedding. I must admit that the thought had occurred to us to get married while we were away travelling, but we hadn’t really taken the idea that seriously until we were in Cairns in January. We took my Dad’s bike out a few times and rode up the coast and decided that Palm Cove was where we wanted to do it.

So we made some pretty big decisions in a pretty short space of time, booked the venue, chose a dress and then jetted out to India. We didn’t give my Mum all that much notice, but she managed to organise the fine details with about 6 weeks to go.

Anthony’s family flew out from the UK and joined my family and some close family friends for the ceremony on 20th May. It was small, calm, and for us, perfect.

Thank you to those of you who made such huge efforts to be there with us, and to everyone else for understanding why we did it this way.

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We arrived in Vietnam with only 6 days left on the visa we’d bought in Australia in December. As we’d underestimated how long we’d need in Nepal we had to rethink this stage of our trip. Initially we had hoped to spend two weeks in Vietnam and two weeks in Cambodia, but once we worked it out we were only going to have ten days to see as much as we could in both places. Once we looked at the logistics and costs of getting around we realised we were going to have to miss either Vietnam or Cambodia. As we already had flights to Hanoi and a visa paid for, Cambodia missed out – much to our dismay. We decided to spend the 6 days in Hanoi to get a taste for Vietnam and are now planning to come back to this part of the world to see more of Vietnam and Cambodia.

Our flight landed at Noi Bai at about 8am local time and within 5 mintues of our taxi journey we’d seen rice paddies populated by people wearing traditional Vietnamese conical hats and plenty of people on bicycles also wearing the aforementioned hat! We liked it already! We were pretty knackered after our 3.30am start in Bangkok so we slept and wrote the Pokhara blog post until late afternoon.

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