Travel

Holidays and short breaks
Argentina (2001)
Chile (2002)
India (2003)
World trip (2005-2006)
Libya (2008)

Travel

Original map (clickable)

(click map to go to World trip)

Also check out our interactive travel map on Travellerspoint.

We have now travelled a fair amount, on a few "exotic" holidays and more recently on a world trip. This section contains details of our trips to Argentina (2001), Chile (2002) and India (2003), and the larger world trip is about our travels between May 2005 and September 2006. The latest trip took us to Libya (2008).

Before we started our World Trip, we had already made three "big" trips, in addition to ordinary holidays and shorter trips abroad. Here are our travel diaries and pictures from those trips. Before these we had only been on short (2-3 weeks) conventional holidays which we didn't really feel worth including here, but maybe a few snaps and stories may make their way here, if and when we feel like it. We have also been on many weekend city breaks around Europe (Barcelona, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Seville, Lisbon, Dublin, Prague, Groningen...) usually to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or just for the hell of it.

Diaries

We kept the diaries from our Big Trips for our own benefit. The whole thing started with Nessie's idea of keeping a travel diary on our honeymoon in Tuscany in 1998. In Argentina Ness wrote a travel diary, while Stef was fast-firing the shutter button. On our next two trips, to Chile and India, we both kept our own diaries. The simple act of committing thoughts to paper was fun and became addictive, even if the diaries weren't intended for anyone else but each other to read. Maybe they were naive attempts to "bottle" experiences but now it's good to flick through them and revisit a place or event in your memory. A diary really brings the memory back to life, more than a picture can do on its own.

Neither of us are naturally talented writers. Our writing experiences have consisted of essays, theses, reports, project plans, proposals, all rather dull material and often never even read closely by anyone. It felt strange to be writing something as personal as a diary. With hindsight they make for rather embarrassing reading. They're just "raw" notes really, a daily listing of facts, of places we have been to, things we have done, and how we felt at the time. Mostly it was a case of quantity over quality. One day, maybe, we'll get round to using the raw material to write a bestselling travel novel... one day...

Pictures

The extensive picture galleries are another victory of quantity over quality, although there are a few gems. As you can read in the first instalment of our Argentina diary, Nessie's plans for a plain, simple point-and-click camera were scuppered and we ended up with a Pentax SLR job with two different lenses. Ever since then Stef has become increasingly snap-happy. For our World Trip he is planning to buy more gadgetry: a digital SLR camera (that'll be a couple of hundred pounds down the drain, not including lenses...) and a simple digital point-and-shoot job for awkward situations. Most of the pictures in this section were taken with the Pentax and scanned in using another gadget, a Nikon CoolScan V film scanner. The scanning process is time-consuming and noisy (and bóóóring!) but Stef will argue the results are worth it, we'll leave you to make up your own mind. To accompany our Pulitzer-winning novel we plan to make a selection of our best photographs. Maybe a beautifully illustrated coffee-table version? But for now we have just dumped the whole lot here...

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