Up until last year, anyone from the UK and a ton of other countries could just fly to the US and simply put up with the intimidating, morose and short-tempered border guards who’d randomly fling you out for no reason other than their wives wouldn’t sleep with them the previous night. Or their coffee had [...]

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I’ve not posted much on here recently as I’ve not one a lot of travelling since I got back last summer. However, I’m trying to organise some things for Easter and summer and thought I’d pop another “Tip” post up. This really applies to you if you’ve got a bit of spare time around the [...]

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All of these hints are from personal experience of a recent (August 2009) round trip from Ho Chi Minh City through Mui Ne, Nha Trang, Da Lat and back again. We used one bike between two of us, a small-ish automatic, and covered around 1100km in six days. Don’t take too much luggage. It increases [...]

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After the fun of finding out that the Thai banks seem to have formed some sort of “let’s screw the farang” cartel, I have more infornation on getting free money out of their ATMs. First up, as far as I can ascertain the Government Savings Bank is free for all, but only accepts Visa cards. [...]

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Courtesy of being disturbed by some bloody selfish Dutch people this morning (and one guy from Eastern Europe or Russia, judging by his accent), I stewed for a while and realised I’d had a few things happen in dorms over the course of this trip. So, here’s a guide on how to behave when sharing [...]

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Sorry for the screaming caps, but I wanted to make this one stand out. Regular readers may recall I mentioned that you can visit the Merpati office in Dili where they’ll book your flight for a $2 booking fee. No money changes hands, you simply take their printout to the airport in Kupang, hand over [...]

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The procedure for getting an Indonesian visa in Dili has sped up somewhat, but is still an administrative ballache. Before I came here I was told that I could expect to wait 7-10 days unless I “knew someone” who could speed up the process. As such, I was looking at flying out directly to Bali [...]

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This one’s definitely worth bearing in mind. I’m sure a lot of us book flights as cheap as we can get them. This usually means getting the ones that can’t be changed, upgraded, moved, altered or cancelled without a complete loss of the ticket cost. Note those two words at the end: “ticket cost”. As [...]

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For some years now I’ve been harping on about how great Nationwide are as the only UK bank with a debit card you can use abroad for no fees. Likewise, their credit card is one of only three (along with Abbey National and the Post Office) with the same no-fee deal. I even changed my [...]

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This one’s for people visiting Cambodia. ANZ, an Aussie/Kiwi bank, is by far the most pervasive here. There are more ATMs belonging to them, and they’re in more convenient locations, than any other bank. Thing is, of the ones which accept foreign cash cards they’re also the only ones that charge a fee on them. [...]

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