I’m making a right meal out of sorting through the photos, I know, but here’s the second country, Cambodia.

Click here for photos from Cambodia – just 25!

Monks who like to discuss British politics

Worst Injury

Hotly contested, here are the worst of my travelling experiences…

Runner up: When dear old Omargh the stunt horse shrugged me off while we were cantering across Middle Earth (also known as Glenorchie, South Island, NZ). I was pretty winded at the time and had bruised ribs for a good three weeks afterwards. Had to abandon my plans to go flying the next day. Not the first time I’ve fallen off a horse. Won’t be the last.
Winner: Pipping Omargh to the post is surfing. About the most full-on all-body workout you can have. Every muscle ached, I had seawater in head cavities I didn’t know existed, lost the skin off both knees and had a badly bruised toe for a couple of weeks afterwards. It was great fun though and I’ll definitely do it again.

Left: Omargh works out where he can offload me. Right: Catching some waves

Worst Mechanical Breakdown

Runner-up: The boat from Siem Reap to Battambang. At least it didn’t break down on the huge choppy lake, I suppose. Engine failed about 3 times in the river. Got beached on sandbanks a few times too.
Winner: When the minibus from Adelaide to Coober Pedy, got stuck in the middle of an ant nest. This is not where you want to be when you have to spend half an hour pushing, take my word for it.

Left: Passengers try to get boat off the sandbank after the engine cuts out. Again. Right: Having freed the minibus from the ant hill, the front wheel of the trailer collapses.

Place should have left sooner

Nowhere was terrible and I didn’t generally stay any one place that long but these are the places where I just had the feeling I’d stayed a day or so too long

Runner-up: Picton, South Island, NZ. This was my first stop in the South Island. It was ok, just a bit too quiet and the weather was cold when I was there. I was actually ended up feeling a bit like I was over travelling. If only I’d known what the rest of the South Island had in store!
Winner: Vientiane, Laos. Just altogether a bit uninspiring with not very much to do. Didn’t think it had much of an atmosphere. Ended up staying a day longer than planned because of the flight schedule.

Left: Picton. Right: Vientiane

Worst Journey

Runner-up: Hué to Hanoi by torture sleeper bus. Second longest 12 hours of my life.
Winner: Siem Reap to Battambang by boat. Fascinating scenery. Just felt I was going to die for much of 12 hours.

Left: The night bus to Hanoi. Right: Inside the boat to Battambang

Most Dangerous Activity

I’d like to begin by saying that most of what I did looked a lot more dangerous than it actually was. An honorable mention goes to luging (Queenstown) which, according to the stats I perused, was about the most likely to have given me a minor injury.

Runner up – White water rafting (Queenstown). This is the only activity where you can change your mind at the last minute and still get your money back because they’re not allowed to pressure you into it. They had 15 medical airlifts in one season. Not sure how many fatalities on that river, but they do make a point of telling you that not everyone who has ridden the rapids has come home alive.
Winner: Helicopter flight training (Wanaka). This was the only thing I did that was not covered by my travel insurance. Whoops. Two weeks after I flew with Wanaka Helicopters (not a large flying school) one of their other instructors and a student pilot were killed in a crash on Mount Aspiring. Flying light aircraft remains a constant battle between your sense of adventure and your better judgement, but very little I’ve experienced in life comes anywhere close to the thrill of piloting a helicopter.

Left: me a fellow adventurer getting kitted up for rafting. I never did get the hang of that hand thing, despite practising for weeks. Right: low level flying down a river. Yeah.

Scariest thing

The boat trip to Battambang I won’t mention again. Riding on the back of mopeds in Cambodia is something I won’t repeat.

Runner-up: When my tandem master for the skydive – this gruff Bulgarian – turned up. I almost burst into tears. I thought, ‘what on earth am I about to do?’
Winner: I’ve done pretty much everything that was put in front of me. I’ve even sought out a fair few scary activities. I couldn’t go in the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam. Turns out my fear of tiny spaces trumps my fear of heights.

Left: skydive in Queenstown. Right: Teensy Vietcong tunnels. No thanks.

Favourite Country

Runner up: Cambodia – lovely people, great archaeology, smashing food (although I’ve no idea what most of it was and you probably should be a little careful to avoid eating rat.)

Winner: Was there any doubt? New Zealand. Happily, also the country I spent the most time in. Nutso people, stunning stunning scenery, more helicopters per head of population than any other country. What’s not to like?

Angor Wat, Cambodia and Wanaka, South Island, New Zealand

Favourite town/city

Runner up: Luang Prabang, Laos. More chilled out than a bowl of mint ice-cream on a glacier, but still with loads to do. Monks, elephants, missile flowerpots, crispy riverweed, Beerlao, sunset over the Mekong…

Winner: Queenstown, NZ. Stunning location on the shore of Lake Wakatipu in the shadow of the Remarkables mountain range and the most gratifying place on earth for any adrenaline freak to spend a week.

French Colonial houses, Luang Prabang and sunset over lake Wakatipu, Queenstown

Place should have stayed longer

Runner up: Punaikiki, South Island, NZ. I passed through here, spending 40 mins checking out the famous pancake rocks. I should have stayed a couple of days soaking up the west coast.

Winner: The Australian outback. I was within sniffing distance of Uluru. I’d like to go back when it’s not pouring with rain and watch the sunset and sleep under an open sky.

Punaikiki, South Island, NZ and the green outback, somewhere south of Coober Pedy, Australia

Best motorised vehicle

Runner up: The twin squirrel helicopter I flew in up onto Franz Josef glacier. The first time I’ve been in a helicopter other than a little 2-seater. Nice machine.

Winner: The awesome truck disguised as a bus that took us through streams and drove us down 90 Mile Beach.

Twin Squirrel and the Dune Rider bus

Best adrenaline activity

I did lots of things that got the old adrenaline pumping (whether that was what they were intended for or not) skydiving, white water rafting, America cup yachting, hiking on glaciers, horse riding, taking public transport in Cambodia etc.. However, in the end it was my nemesis – heights – that triumphed.

Runner up: Helicopter flying lesson. I hesitated to put this here as I have never considered flying an adrenaline activity. It’s about more than just that – the mastery of the machine, the pure sensation of flight, the amazing scenery etc. But there’s no denying, it gets you buzzing afterwards like very little else.

Winner: Bungy jumping (Kawarau Bridge). I had no intention of doing a bungy jump before I left the UK. I did two. Go figure.

Left: Piloting a R22 in Wanaka. Right: BUNGY!!!! at Kawarau Bridge, Queenstown.

Best museum

Runner up: War museum, Siem Reap, Cambodia. I had the place to myself. An orchard full of rusting Russian tanks and heavy artillery. Open fronted sheds with landmines and weapons and shells. A former Khmer Rouge child soldier who had me touch his collar-bone where there is still shrapnel embedded beneath the skin. It’s not often you get goosebumps going round a museum.

Winner:  Australian War Memorial. Best war museum I’ve been to. And I’ve been to one or two. You never got the blog post as it turned into a rather lengthy essay. I might brush it off and stick it up.

Left: my guide demonstrates his former weapon, the M-15. Right: the memorial part of the Australian War Memorial museum

Best souvenir

Runner up: Handmade glass beads bought direct from the artist himself at a handicrafts market in Queenstown. The blue one on the left is his interpretation of the tiny universe round the cat’s neck in Men in Black. The one on the right I bought because it had the colours of Queenstown; the lake and the hills and the clouds and the leaves.

Winner: Bungy jump photos and video. Endlessly amusing. Well, to me at least.

Left: handmade glass beads - marbles for grown-ups. Right: Bungy - the aftermath

Best meal

I had a lot of very nice food. Special mentions must go to the little round pork and lemongrass sausages from a street vendor in Bangkok, and the pizza place in Vientiane, Laos, where I unexpectedly had probably the best pizza of my life.

Runner up: On my last night in Hanoi I had a meal of prawn mousse on sugar cane and fresh rice rolls. The mousse was formed like a sausage around the sugar cane. You could crunch the cane afterwards. It was a bit too fibrous to eat, but full of delicious, sweet, delicate juice. The rice rolls you made up yourself (like fajitas) from a pile of ingredients including noodles, breansprouts, herbs and peanuts.

Winner: Cambodian tasting platter, from Terrace Des Elephants, Siem Reap, Cambodia. I had a couple different versions of these. A cornucopia of exotic flavours, beautifully presented too.

I don't have a photo for the prawn mousse, so here's a coffee from Hanoi. Right: Cambodian platter

Best wildlife encounter

Runner up: I’m going to pick three days in Taree, when I saw fruitbats, kangaroos, goannas, lorikeets, kookaburras, eagles, pelicans, bush turkeys, dolphins and an echidna all in the wild. There were koalas too, in the koala hospital.

Winner: Kayaking with seals in Abel Tasman National Park, NZ, particularly when the pup jumped up on my neighbour’s kayak.

Left: fruitbats roosting. Right: seal pup

Best domestic animal encounter

Runner-up: Riding and washing elephants in the river in Laos.
Winner: Riding my aunt’s ex-champion endurance horse, Okey Dokey, in the Australian rain forest in Taree. He wouldn’t throw me off like that horse in Queenstown…grumble…grumble…

Left: clean elephants ready for inspection. Right: A pair of grey ponies - Okey on the right.

Best historical site

This is a really hard category as I saw many impressive and moving historical places, like the two genocide sites in Phnom Penh.

Runner up: Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  One of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen – sleek sixties architecture meets oriental interior design. Preserved at the moment the North Vietnamese forces took Saigon.

Winner: Ta Prohm, Cambodia. Part of the Angkor complex – the site with the trees dripping over the ruins. Just completely unlike anything you have ever seen before. Featured in the Tomb Raider movie.

Reunification Palace and Ta Prohm

The people’s choice award for most popular item of clothing

Runner up: Elephant trousers. Purchased in Cambodia. Deliberately left behind in a hotel in Hoi An, although the woman tried to give them back, thinking I’d left them behind by mistake. Hello? Did you see them?

Winner: Elephant dress. Really not that exciting.

Elephant trousers and the elephant dress (worn as a skirt)

I’m still working on the Golden Pho Bowl Awards. They’re turning into quite an undertaking, but the first lot (the positive awards) should be ready tomorrow.

In the meantime, click here to see the 20 best photos I took in Laos. As voted for by myself. Sorting through the several thousand photos I took is also rather time consuming, hence I’ve only finished one country so far.

Here’s one to whet your appetite.

Elephants in Laos

• Museums visited: 44
• Books read: 19
• Weddings attended: 1
• Horses ridden: 3
• Elephants ridden: 2
• T-shirts purchased: 9
• Pairs of sunglasses purchased: 3
• Pairs of sunglasses lost: 2
• Bouts of food poisoning: 1
• Bead shops visited: 4
• Maori hakas watched: 3
• Fewest days in a country: 6 (Thailand)
• Most days in a country: 42 (New Zealand)
• Weapons fired: 2
• Flights in planes: 14
• Flights in helicopters: 2
• Flights under a parachute: 1
• Total number of different methods of transportation: 22*

* Horse, surfboard, kayak, plane, helicopter, passenger ship, speed boat, coach, car, minibus, bamboo train, cable car, gondola, luge, train, parachute, moped, tuk tuk, ride-on mower, elephant, chairlift, sailing yacht.

I have a lot of clothes. Well, no more than the average 36-year-old woman, but after living out of a rucksack for 4 months I don’t even know where to start dressing myself properly. Packing for a weekend in London brought me out in a cold sweat. I still failed, turning up to my swanky London hairdressing salon looking like some scruffy oik in jeans, t-shirt and boots with no makeup.

Travelling has inspired in me a desire to live with less stuff. I feel it weighing me down. I accumulated about 8 kilos of stuff while travelling. 8 kilos! What on earth is it all? (9 t-shirts for a start…) If I can acquire that much while living out of a rucksack, how much do we accumulate in normal life?

Having my own laptop again is an extreme luxury after months of renting my internet access by the minute. I think it was good for me to get a break from it, but I’d definitely take my netbook next time. Having just been reunited with my iphone, I can’t work out what I used to spend so much time on it doing.

Almost the first thing I did on getting home was to buy some new itunes. I am bored witless by the music on my ipod after nothing new for months.

I keep hitting the £ key instead of the @ key. Keyboards in other countries don’t have pound signs – the @ symbol shares the same key as ’3′. It’s always intrigued me how the colonies ended up using dollars not pounds. I digress.

I can’t remember how to use my clock radio.

I have approximately 4,500 photos. I’ve spent a good couple of hours just sorting them into country folders and turning them all the right way round. Next I’ll remove the rubbish and pick out the best for general consumption. Some people have requested the full works. Bring a comfy cushion.

I’ve spent the last three days down in Devon. First the parents got me working on the allotment…

Baby beans

Then we got out to enjoy the countryside, driving down damp shady little lanes, the hedgerows thick with ferns and bluebells and pink campion. Past ancient lichen-encrusted granite and slate farm houses that look like they’ve grown out of the ground. The air is saturated with the scent of pollen and birdsong.

Acer

Wysteria - so pretty

The post you’ve all been waiting for. Possibly. Find out my favourite country, my worst injury, my best meal…

These are the categories currently up for consideration. Let me know if there are any others you’d like to see!

• Worst injury
• Worst mechanical breakdown
• Best museum
• Worst museum
• Best adrenaline activity
• Best souvenier
• Best meal
• Worst meal
• Favourite town or city
• Best wildlife encounter
• Place should have stayed longer
• Place should have left sooner
• Worst journey
• Best vehicle
• Favourite country
• Best historical site

Attention plane geeks.

The new(ish) Airbus A380 is a beast. It uses three airbridges to get everyone on board.  Inside it’s the same 3-4-3 seat configuration across as a 747 but it just feels cavernous. And there’s another full length deck above us. I look out of the window and all I can see is a colossal, gently curving wing the size of Luxembourg. Even when those big engines get going it’s still quiet. When they dim the main lights, the cabin is bathed in subtle violet light like an expensive bar. There are self service areas for snacks and drinks if you get peckish between meals. Turbulence feels smoother.

Inflight entertainment has come a long way since the days of one tv screen shared between several passengers. I am still traumatised by the memory of that Air France flight back from Cuba where the only movie was The Bourne Supremacy dubbed into French and then subtitled back into English.

The individual seat-back screens are all touch screen, but there’s also a detachable keypad in the arm for playing games or sending messages to other passengers. There are over 1000 movies, tv programmes, music, games, inflight information etc. I make myself up a little inflight playlist of rock songs.

My favourite feature is skycam – a tail-mounted camera that provides live video feeds during the flight. All I need is a little steering wheel and I’ll be happy as Larry.

Skycam - the eagle has landed

 My journey home is 40 hours door-to-door. Auckland to Sydney. Sydney to Singapore. Singapore to London. London to Plymouth (tha last leg by coach).

By the time I get on my third flight I’ve been awake for over 24 hours and have no idea what time it is anywhere. I’ve even getting bored by the John Travolta safety briefing videos. I settle down to eat my third dinner.

When travelling internationally time disappears, slips through your fingers like sand as you flit between time zones. We chase the sunset for three hours, intense layers of indigo and flame orange. Eventually it leaves us behind and we fly on in darkness for hour after hour. A gargantuan lightning storm flickers off the left wing - otherworldly flashes of white light illuminating black clouds, pierced by forked lightning.

Finally I land in London at 6.30am after 36 hours travel. I’ve had about 3 hours sleep but feel surprisingly chipper. I spend the £5 note I’ve had in my wallet for the last 4 months on a cappuccino from Nero while waiting for my coach. I do need to break myself of the habit of halving the number cost of everything to translate NZ $ to UK £ or I’m going to go around thinking everything is much cheaper than it actually is.

My first and overriding impression of England is it’s green – intensely, freshly green. The native plants of most of the other counties I’ve travelled to have been evergreens or tropical and there’s a particular fleshy exuberance to deciduous trees at this time of year, after the first burst of spring growth.

My parents have put out some welcome home balloons and banners. They’ve redecorated the spare room for me, including framing three of my New Zealand photos. There’s a new horse magazine on the bedside table and a new pair of pyjamas on the pillow. I hand out some presents, have a glass of pink bubbly and then work on staying awake for the next seven hours.

Tomorrow I fly back to the UK. I can’t believe my trip is almost over.

I have several posts worth of material left from the trip, plus some thoughts on the whole thing and getting back to normal life. Don’t miss the Golden Pho Bowl Awards!  Then I have a whole bunch of photos to organise and put up on flickr. I hope you’ll carry on reading.

Many of my maritime adventures have taken place in less than ideal conditions and yesterday was no exception. The forecast was for up to 35 knots of wind in the bay with occasional squalls and I was about to go out in an 80-foot America’s Cup yacht that was only designed to race in 20 knots. “The first rule is to stay in the boat,” the skipper tells us. “The second rule is to stay in the boat.”

Our boat at rest - the catchily named NZL40

I try to ignore my misgivings as we motor out into the bay. The first task is to get the sails up. This requires a fair amount of labour from us ‘passengers’ who have to operate the grinders. The are four grinders on the boat, each operated by two people. They look like hand-operated bicycle pedals at waist height. Forwards and backwards according to the crew’s shouted instructions. Sometimes they fly almost faster than you can grip on. Other times all your weight isn’t enough to shift them. I look up at what seems like acres of carbon fibre and Kevlar sail, stretched taut in the wind. It’s a glorious sight.

It doesn’t help that the deck is not exactly level. The optimal racing angle for this boat is 28 degrees. Sometimes it’s steeper. You grasp the grinder handles, foot wedged against the column, looking down the steep deck at the sea water below breaking over the side. It seems a miracle that it doesn’t capsize, but it’s just physics. Around 80% of the weight of the boat is in the keel. The keel comprises the fin (spiky bit below the boat) and a large lead-alloy bulb on the end of that. The rest of the boat is light-as-a-feather carbon fibre.

It’s a much smoother ride through the swell than I’d expected because of that weight distribution. But there are the occasional alarming creaks and lengthy discussions between the crew about what sail configuration to use. The boat is operating in weather conditions at its limits.

For a time we share the water with the next generation of America’s Cup boats – catamarans with futuristic, boxy sails, 40-foot trial versions of the 80-foot boats that will contest the cup in two years time. They leave us in their wake, balancing on one hull in the stiff wind, pursued by an entourage of RIBs, motor boats and helicopters. (I see the footage that evening on the tv news).

And for ten minutes I get to take the helm of this splendid vessel, standing behind one of the two, metre-high wheels, making small adjustments as we cut through the grey waves and the wind catches our sails. I steer us under the Auckland harbour bridge, avoiding the bungy jumpers to port and a low hanging gantry to starboard. The towering black mast is a tight fit under the high steel arch.

I end up back on dry land with very wind-tousled hair and saltier than a salted peanut, but sailing is definitely something I want to do more of in the future.

I didn’t take my camera on board but you can see photos and a cool little video here.