Being back in Bangalore brings back floods of memories. My wife and I lived here when we had our first baby. This wasn't part of our plan, particularly: we found out we were expecting during the first week we moved here, back in late 2003. That was a challenging time for us: workwise I was building a new team in Bangalore for Autodesk's consulting division, while Celia was dealing with all the issues related to a first pregnancy in a foreign country. Not to mention my father being diagnosed with terminal cancer, back in the UK. Our two years in…

In total we stayed for 5 days in Kodaikanal, India. It's really not the ideal time of year to visit Kodaikanal: the Northeast Monsoon is just getting started, so you can end up staying indoors more than you'd like. But then when you're on a world tour you're inevitably going to experience imperfect timing at one point or another (another example from this trip includes being in South America not long after their mid-winter). So it goes. As luck would have it, during the first 3 days of our stay in Kodaikanal we had near-perfect weather. It was a lot…

We left Singapore from Changi airport on Tuesday night. I always enjoy flying from Changi: there's so much to see and do, and they have some great traveller-oriented features such as security at each gate rather than in a central location. Our kids came across a Kinect-based experience where you could see your outline projected onto a large screen with physical (i.e. not electronic) pixels. Like a huge e-Ink display, I suppose. Our next destination was Coimbatore. Coimbatore is a smaller Indian city that had two main benefits as a stop on our tour: it has direct flights from Singapore…

We've spent the last 5 days staying with our good friends, Rishad and Shefali, in Singapore. This was one of the three "must see" destinations chosen by our kids, having been picked by our daughter, Anokhi. (The others being the Great Barrier Reef (Kalan) and Machu Picchu (Zephyr).) Mainly because she loves spending time with our friends. One of the first places we visited was the Botanical Gardens – a UNESCO Heritage site and a great place to wander around and experience the native rainforest that once covered the island of Singapore. After real trees, we simply had to visit…

Our path to Malaysia from Cairns took us via Sydney, where we had to recheck bags and change terminal. The flight was delayed by over an hour because of a medical emergency – not on the plane itself, someone in a stretcher would be occupying a section of the plane as it flew onwards to Kuala Lumpur. It was a little strange seeing the curtained-off stretcher in the economy cabin: it's not something I'd seen before. I hope the person arrived safely and is getting the treatment they need. The flight itself was about 8.5 hours. Over half of the…

After the somewhat disappointing end to our boat tour from Airlie Beach to the Whitsundays, we licked our wounds and headed back on the road towards Cairns. Our next stop was at a very nice Bluewater Park Rest Area – a free campground on the outskirts of the boringly named Townsville. It was pretty nice staying in a place with mango trees growing everywhere: we did pick a few, to try, although the local ants did their best to aggressively protect what they apparently considered to be their property. By this point we felt we'd finally broken the back of…

We continued our path northwards from Rockhampton, and did a big chunk of the drive to Mackay. We stopped for lunch at a rest area in Marlborough, which ended up being a great place to take a break. About 40km south of Mackay we found a place to stay via CamperMate in a place called Ilbilbie. It looked fairly non-descript from the road… … but we soon realised we'd struck campervan gold: the farmer lets people park in a big, flat field down by the river on their property and charges A$10 for the privilege. No power, no toilets, no…

We arrived late Thursday morning in Brisbane: the flight took 1.5 hours, but – due to the fact Queensland doesn't observe daylight saving – we arrived at 11:40 after an 11:10 departure from Sydney. When we originally budgeted time for Australia we scheduled 5 or so days for Sydney (which were eaten into by us extending our stay in New Zealand) and then about 10 days to get from Brisbane to Cairns (flying into Brisbane on the 2nd, flying out of Cairns on the 13th). When we came to book a campervan we realized we didn't have as much time…

As we'd extended our stay in New Zealand, we knew we only had one day to enjoy the fine city of Sydney. The flight from Queenstown was fairly short (3.5 hours) but really pretty: both the take-off and the landing were spectacular. On arrival we were happy – given the fact we're 5 people with quite a few bags – to be able to get an UberXL from the airport to our Airbnb in Glebe. It took some work to find the car – the Uber app does a horrible job of suggesting a workable pick-up spot at Sydney airport,…

After spending most of the day in Christchurch, last Wednesday, we headed towards Lake Tekapo. Much of the drive was fairly flat and straight, so we made good progress despite starting out late. As we got closer to the lake the weather set in again, though – it started to rain fairly heavily – so we opted to stay in a place called Fairlie, which was half an hour closer than the lake. Musterers High Country Accommodation ended up being a great place to stay: when we woke – thankfully to much better weather – we found ourselves basically on…