Two Years of Wandering

Damn, time really does fly when you're having fun. This last year has gone even faster than the first one we spent away from home...maybe because we spent four months of it in Holland where some semblance of a routine (not to mention a hectic social calendar) made time whiz by faster than usual. 

In the tradition of our anniversary of leaving Australia, here's a little snapshot of how we've spent the last 12 months. 

Number of countries visited: 12 (Cuba, Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, Russia, China, Mongolia, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar)

Total distance traveled: somewhere around the 30,000km mark, including the flight from Cuba to Frankfurt

Favourite places: Vinales Valley (Cuba); Berlin; St Petersburg; all of Mongolia (except phenomenally ugly Ulan Bataar); Beijing, Xi'an Muslim Quarter and Guangxi countryside (China); Muang Ngoi Neua and Si Phan Don (Laos). 

Number of bottles of rum tasted: 16 (can this really be accurate?? I thought we drank this many in Cuba alone). 

Best Rum: Diplomatico Reserva 8 Años; Ron Matusalem 15 Años and special mention to Myanmar's Mandelay Rum for producing probably the world's best flavour:price ratio rums.

Money, Money, Money: ahhh, the question on everyone's lips. Many, many people have asked how we've managed to live work-free lives of leisure for the last two years. Well...there's no big secret peeps. 

We saved a shitload of cash; that's how. 

Since leaving Australia we have spent around AUD$64,000 which averages out to $87 a day. During our four months in the Netherlands we earned enough money to cover our (mainly beer-related) expenses- around $11,000 between us- but aside from that all of our cash was earned before we left in Oz. 

Our budget has been generous- we allowed $100 a day for Latin America, Europe, Russia, Mongolia and China and then dropped back to $75 a day once we hit South-East Asia. This lets us do pretty much everything we want, though granted we have inexpensive taste in terms of food, accommodation and transport. 

Hell, if we didn't like sundowners and have a predilection for rum we could probably have squeezed an extra year out of our money!!