In general, I believe that anything is possible, that’s mostly what’s got us where we are today. But if you’d asked me, even 3 weeks ago, if I ever thought I’d see a blue whale, the biggest creature that has ever existed on our fragile planet, the answer would have been a resounding “No!”. But …
As I just said on my Facebook page, words cannot express how much we love Sri Lanka. Seriously! It’s like stepping into comfy slippers. So good to be back. The four of us have been sick with terrrible Malaysian flu for over a week now. Really ill, high fevers, sweats, shakes, chills, headaches and an awful lot …
Kuala Lumpur is a wonderful city, in one moment ultra-slick and modern, the next ancient, traditional and cultured. Its a city everybody should experience at least once, and a city that many of us these days visit because of the great connections Air Asia offer. Prices seem low at the moment, they’re lower than we’ve …
Legoland Malaysia is outside Johor Bahru in Malaysia. It is just north of Singapore, in the far south of Malaysia south of Kuala Lumpur. We visited this Legoland park with our kids, then 7 and 9 years old, making a special trip south from Kuala Lumpur and Melacca, just to visit Legoland Malaysia and the Legoland …
By popular demand, here are our experiences of hotels near Legoland Malaysia Johor Bahru. We had a really good time at Legoland Malaysia and at the Legoland Water Park, right next door. You will certainly need an absolute minimum of two full days in the parks here, a 3 night hotel stay. You could easily …
This post is about how to get to Legoland Malaysia from Malacca, the bus journey, where to stay near Legoland and more. It’s also about our experiences of travelling in Malaysia. I’ve been really struggling with travel in Malaysia lately. After the first couple of days in Malacca, loving the ancient buildings and churches, I …
Keeping the children happy in Malacca isn’t hard at all. Malacca with kids is a great destination with plenty for them to see and do. The town is bright, colourful and filled with interesting sights, tastes and smells. There are forts and canons to climb on, great museums and great shops, plus indoor and outdoor …
Malacca doesn’t seem to be much of a backpacker town, most of the tourists we see are local and/or considerably richer than us, which isn’t hard. Maybe all the backpackers are in other districts rather than the Old Town. Finding cheap accommodation (for a family of 4 in particular) in Malacca has been tricky. We …
Malacca is a strange place. Arriving on the bus from Kuala Lumpur, on motorways that could easily have been in Surrey, I felt as if we’d left Asia. It was all a bit too Western. We got off the bus at Malacca Sentral, not to be greeted by touts, but by helpful people pointing us in the direction …
We were on Ko Phangan for 6 weeks, looking back, it was a blissful, perfect time, other than my husband’s health problems. It’s a lovely island, but if my husband hadn’t had surgery we would have moved on earlier as it was just slightly over our budget. We used Haad Salad Villas Ko Phangan and highly recommend …
During our first year of full time travel ( our family gap year, if you like) we were on a tight budget. We kept to around $50 per day in South East Asia and the whole year came in at $100 per day. During that year we took two cruises. Both were trans Atlantic repositioning …
One of our readers wrote: I’d love to simply hear more about your day-to-day lives. What do your kids do all day? How does one spend six weeks in a remote place….I honestly have no idea. Don’t you (and the kids) run out of things to do? I just can’t fathom how you pass each day! Six …
Chef and I have always enjoyed budget travel. We’ve always wanted to get maximum travel for our dollar and to us, fancy hotels aren’t (usually) part of that. We make exceptions for the odd splurge but usually we travel to see the world and to learn from our experiences. We need somewhere to sleep and …
We have absolutely loved staying on Haad Salad, Ko Phangan for the last 6 weeks. It’s a beautiful beach paradise with calm, clear waters that my children can safely swim in and kayak on. We found good, cheap family accommodation and enjoyed good Thai food and rainbow sunsets . But there are a few dangers …
5 years of travel, 2 years of homeschooling before that and we’ve never really had what you might call a schedule. It’s going great, so I’d argue that you don’t need one, but that’s to come. When I first started homeschooling, with a 7 year old and a 5 year old, I thought we would …
How do you start an adventure? I started mine with my first ever blog post on my free wordpress.com site. I took it down when I started a self-hosted blog with my own domain name. (Read how to do that here, the basics remain unchanged for 2025.) That original first post is below. We did …
If you read my last post about Chef’s hospitalisation, you’ll know that I wasn’t feeling too good. I’d even asked at the pharmacy for Xanax, I felt that bad. I was experiencing palpitations, shortness of breath ( probably through anxiety), headaches, hot flushes and a few other things that I didn’t mention. All these symptoms …
This morning, 4 months into our trip, my husband is having emergency hernia repair surgery on Ko Samui. I’ve always said medical care is great in Thailand, but I wasn’t expecting to test it out! My fit, healthy, Iron Man husband was absolutely fine on Saturday afternoon. He was playing around with the kids. We got a taxi …
I’ve posted before about how much I love India, but Goa was my first love. I went on a cheap package holiday for the first time in 1998 and returned several times before we got into the swing of independent long-term travel. Why visit Goa rather than some other part of India? Is it worth …
Four months ago this week I wrote about the things I’d miss as we left Port Douglas to explore the world. Just the three of us, Chef caught up with us later. I haven’t missed home at all, we’re having a brilliant adventure, but things haven’t gone quite as expected. Our unplanned travel style has come …
Travel makes you wise, we all know that, and wisdom makes you sexier and cooler, but on a totally shallow level, travel also makes you thinner, or it can. It works for me. You may have noticed that we love our food here at World Travel Family, it’s a big part of travel for us. …
Did I tell you about the time we accidentally took a Doctor Who toy through customs? It was back in 2011 when we were touring the UK from Australia. It was just the boys and I, Chef was stuck in work. We’re big Doctor Who fans in this family, visiting the Doctor Who Experience in …
Years ago, in Vietnam, when we were on our first RTW, I had a go at driving the moped we’d hired. I got my twisting, pulling and pushing mixed up and mounted the pavement extremely inelegantly, scattering the picnicking Vietnamese family who were quietly enjoying their lunch. I hadn’t been near a moped since because …
In our first year on the road we weren’t just about family budget travel, we were rocking extreme budget travel. Our budget for Asia on on our first year of full-time family travel was crazy-low, it hovered between $40 and $50 per day. That’s not much for a family of four and it’s certainly a …
You have plenty of options for getting from Bangkok to Koh Samui in the far southwest of Thailand. Modern Thailand is an incredibly easy country to travel around, thanks to its long-established tourism industry, you’ll certainly be able to find a way of getting to Koh Samui from Bangkok that suits you. Once you reach …
I could tell you how we got from Laos to Bangkok easily on the fabulous sleeper train and how we’re now safely installed in a hotel in Bangkok, but that would be LIES! And I’m not going to lie to you, so here’s all the icky, grumpy, boring bits of real life family travel from …
The Monster of Concrete is a nickname given to a large concrete monument in Vientiane, Laos. It is correctly known as the Patuxay or Victory Gate of Vientiane and stands on one of the main traffic intersections in the city. It is a popular tourist attraction in Laos and visitors can climb up within the …
We’ve been backpacking with kids, full-time for well over 6 years so we can share the best tips with you. For us it’s the vacation that never ended and we’re that rare thing, a family travel blog that actually travels full-time. Here we share our best tips for backpacking with kids – based on real …
This is for anyone out there, like me, who is stressing about travel vaccinations. The crazy cost of them in Australia and wondering what it’s like to get them in Malaysia or Kuala Lumpur specifically. If that’s not you, don’t worry, you can go and read something else like our guide to Kuala Lumpur with …
Beautiful Vang Vieng, Laos is known for tubing and a crazy backpacker party scene. Not many people would associate it with family travel and it hasn’t always had the best reputation. We’ve spent over four weeks in Vang Vieng with our kids and we all loved it there, despite the rain. I can give you …
Australia with kids. What does it have to offer? Is it worth the mammoth flight to take your kids to Australia from the US, UK, or Europe for a family holiday? If you’re already in Australia, where are the best places to take kids? What should you see in Australia and what are the practicalities …
I keep quoting this figure of $41/day as our budget, that’s actually a lie, our budget for Laos is working out at a lot more than that, everything considered. We’re cheating rather too much on cake, beer and coffee, but Laos is indisputably cheap, cheaper than Thailand, and low accommodation costs are a big part …
Gorgeous little Luang Prabang in Laos is quite the tourist hot spot these days since the arrival of the airport and railway line. Yet it still retains its sleepy Laos charm. The Luang Prabang Night Market is one of the best of its kind in the world and delights tourists with its crafts, trinkets and …
If you boarded the bus to Luang Prabang from Vang Vieng, took your assigned seat and looked up to see this over your head, would you be worried? You’d be right to be. We had the seats with the built-in internal rain shower. Every time we climbed a hill (and there were many on this …
Laos isn’t a standout foodie destination in the way that some other Southeast Asian countries are. In Laos, you’ll find a blend of cuisines, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Laotian, reflecting movements of borders and peoples. The French influence is there, particularly in baguettes, cheese and bakeries, and you’ll also find foods from other countries, pizzas, …
We’ve been in Luang Prabang, Laos, for almost a week now. It’s been a strange few days and we weren’t enjoying Luang Prabang as much as we’d hoped the second time around. It’s changed a lot. Luang Prabang is all about wealthy fly-in tourists these days. They’ve built an international airport here since we came last …
This is an old post, I wrote it when we’d been on the road just months, I wanted to touch base with followers and let them know that we were finding time to do some “school” as we travelled around the world. We travelled like this for over 6 years. I wanted to share that …
This blog post is from 2014, when we spent 4 weeks in sleepy Vang Vieng. In 2026, we returned. Vang Vieng has changed in some ways, in others not. The “Friends” bars are gone. Otherside Bar, in one of our photos, is now a minimart. There are a lot more activities in Vang Vieng today, …
Getting to Laos from Thailand. This post is about the journey from Kanchanaburi Thailand, to Bangkok, to Nong Khai on to Laos, Vientiane, and on to Vang Vieng. We had to get out of Thailand, we loved Kanchanaburi and were very happy just chilling there, but our visa was running out and we needed to …
We’ve been in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, sitting here on the River Kwai for a week now. What have we been doing? A Kanchanaburi blog from this sleepy riverside town in Thailand. Well, nothing, really. Sleeping on a raft, eating, reading, using computers and just watching the world go by. We did managed a little bit of …
Travel bloggers will hate me for posting this, but I’m known for my honesty, maybe for being rather pedantic at times. Reading too many travel blogs can give you entirely the wrong impression. This post came about after trusting information from smaller travel blogs and finding that their rosy picture was less than factual. Lonely …
Your options for getting from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi include train, bus, taxi and minibus. There is no airport in Kanchanaburi, you can’t fly. Read on for more information on getting to Kanchanaburi, video of what the train is like, information on how to book train or bus tickets plus day tours, hotels in Kanchanaburi and things …
