Recently on Twitter we were asked if we had taken part in the “My 7 Links” feature from Tripbase. A week or so later we appeared in Wired2theworlds post and they nominated us to do exactly the same. So we both sat down together and decided what previous posts fitted the following criteria…

Your most beautiful post…

The post that sprung straight to our minds was our Koh Kong Island tour in Cambodia.

We loved everything about this part of our travels through Cambodia…Bartering with Mr T to arrange our own personal tour with two other travellers Carl and Ali, we arranged a tour that doesn’t usually happen over 2 days. We had two devoted locals one acted as our tour guide, the other as the boat driver. We visited the most desolate, untouched beaches either of us have ever experienced and swam in crystal clear blue water. We had every beach completely to ourselves and ate amazing fresh seafood, barbecued and prepared by our two trusty Cambodian friends. To top this off we stayed at a very local floating fishing village, played with the children, visited their school, played pool with the locals and eventually stayed in one of their family homes. This was a truely authentic Cambodian home-stay experience, far far away from any tourists.

The second part of the blog post for Koh Kong is featured here, just in case you didn’t see enough beauty in the first one!

Your most popular post…

We were pretty happy to discover that our most popular post (according to Google Analytics) was from our Yuanyang Rice Terraces visit in Yunnan Province, China. The bus journey from Kunming was as ever a little scary in parts and often delayed along the narrow mountain roads, and when we arrived in Yuanyang there were no views, only fog! This is very normal for this part of the world though, often the valleys are deep-set in very thick fog, but when the fog lifts the rice terraces reflect all the light around in their pools of water stretching out for miles. This is a breathtaking part of the world, with a very strong traditional and cultural heritage stemming from ancient hill tribe minorities. It is one of the highlighted things to do in China so perhaps this explains why it has been our most popular blog post. Sunny’s Guesthouse is also recommended in the Lonely Planet so this may have helped!

Your most controversial post…

We haven’t really gone into too much controversy whilst travelling through Asia, there are many areas we could have touched on with regard to Communist run governments but we weren’t there to be political journalists! However whilst we were in Vietnam staying in Mui Ne on the coast we did experience first-hand a little bit of uneasy Police action. Two policemen decided to stop us not long after we had set off on a hired motorbike for the day. Their reason being that we didn’t have a Vietnamese drivers license! To cut a long story short, TET was one week away and we were told after our shared $50 dollar fine with the bike owner that this sort of thing does happen quite frequently around the National Holidays as the Police are in effect collecting their beer money in the form of fines!! Thanks for that one! This story features in the second part of the post.

Your most helpful post…

We’ve written a few tips and tricks posts, reviews and recipes from our cooking course experiences and even offered the chance for one lucky follower to win a print from our travels! But the most helpful post would be our Top 5 tours in Asia. We’ve gone into who we booked it with and why, the costs, what we thought was good, bad and so on. We didn’t always choose the obvious tour with the obvious tour operator so we were really happy with the tours we chose and wanted to share this with the rest of the travelling community.

A post whose success surprised you…

Not an obvious choice when it comes to written content and the response we received, but the post focusing around our stay in Luang Prabang, Laos has proven to be very successful. This is down to the imagery that we shot whilst we were staying there. We ended up staying longer in this quaint World Heritage town, and shot some really atmospheric photography centred around colour, texture and mood along with some great documentary work of locals and tourists in and around the place. We’ve also had one image accepted for an International Award and our first print sale came from some imagery contained within this blog post.

A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved…

We were blown away by how magical a place The Summer Palace really is. We loved our imagery from our day here, very atmospheric with layers of mist encompassing ornate hand carved palaces, bridges and pagodas. Very easy to get to if you take the metro there which means it only costs 20p each way!! The site is huge, and we could have easily spent 2 days if not longer to capture the sheer essence of the Summer Palace site. Most people visiting Beijing will focus on the Great Wall, Tiannamen Square and the Forbidden City but we think The Summer Palace should be way up there on that list!!

The post that you are most proud of…

Perhaps an obvious choice but we are truly proud of our very first post from Japan! This shows us setting off from the UK and records our first day as we arrived in Tokyo. We were both jaded from jetlag and the Leica was still an exciting new tool for us to photograph with. On the Tokyo metro we snapped away discretely at our fellow passengers, managed to go the wrong way, and had our first taste of authentic Japanese noodles! It was all so new and exciting back then and we were on a high with street photography, getting the first travel blog-post out and starting our journey.

Thanks to wired2theworld for the nomination, we both hope you enjoyed our 7 links. Here are our five nominations…

• Totaltravelbug.com

• Worldtravelguide.net

• blog.networkosaka.com

• Good.Is

• weblogtheworld.com

Here are our top FIVE tours from our Notworkrelated adventure in Asia…

1: Cambodia – Boat trip, beaches and fishing village, Koh Kong Island

Company: Koh Kong Eco Tours, organiser Mr T booked from their office next to the Dug Out Guesthouse in Koh Kong.

We met Ali and Carl and the 4 of us wanted to visit Koh Kong Island – our main reason for travelling to the area. After much discussion and debate Mr T customised a tour for us the night we arrived for a departure the following day. We paid $55 each for a 2 day 1 night tour over to the Island, with 2 bbq lunches. one evening meal, one breakfast and a home stay. The Island was breathtaking, with around 6 beaches to explore, on which stood no other tourists other than us, we had the place to ourselves! With one guide and one boat driver they cooked us excellent fresh seafood, taxied us from one beach to another and delivered us back to Koh Kong via a rare and huge Mangrove forest arriving safe and sound.

The reason this was our number one tour is that it was so personal to what we wanted to do and we had the most authentic experience of Cambodian hospitality in the form of a floating fishing village homestay. The children loved us being there, we ate with the families, played pool on a snooker table and slept in their home. A true homestay and a very humbling one. The beaches are also idyllic on the Island.

This tour was excellent value for money, we received great hospitality and it was a wonderful experience.

We booked the tour once we arrived in Koh Kong at Koh Kong Eco Tours office based at The Dug Out hotel on street 3 (although we wouldn’t recommend the Dug Out for customer service they do have a great tour company positioned right on their doorstep) A bus from Phnom Penh took 5 hours and cost around $10 each. Our blog post for this tour is featured here.

2: China – Trekking and exploring The Great Wall

We booked our Great Wall tour through the Chinese Cultural Centre based in Bejing and paid around £22 for a one day trip with no food. We visited a remote part of the wall called JianKou Great Wall and we only passed 3 other people the entire time we were there! It’s 73km north of Beijing and is a truly wild and beautiful section of the wall and described as being one of the most dangerous parts of the entire Great Wall.

Why did we put this as number 2? We had a local tour guide from the village from where the walk started who provided us with information about the history of this part of the wall and what it meant to the village. We walked for around 3-4 hours taking in the immense scale of the wall in a very autumnal landscape. Afterwards sitting in the tour guides home with his family was a great way to finish the day. You can view our full write up on this tour along with a few other China Highlights here.

3: Vietnam – From Ho Chi Minh City, cycling in The Mekong Delta

A 3 days 2 nights cycling tour booked through Sinhbalo Adventure taking us through the  Inner Mekong region. A fantastic tour that saw us take in wonderful parts of the Mekong in a way that most people don’t – on a bike. Most tours tend to operate in the form of bus and boat transport and we fancied something different. There were 4 of us on the tour with one tour guide named Du-at, a driver and our own bikes. Our bags were transported from one destination to the other which was a great help when cycling.

We travelled on a variety of boats to various parts of the Mekong, visited a traditional Mekong Delta house and kitchen, ate seasonal fruits, tea and rice cakes, had 3 lunches, 2 evening meals and 2 breakfasts included in the price, as well as our own branded Sinh Balo cycling top! Our tour guide had excellent knowledge of local routes and trials through the delta and villages. Accommodation comprised of one night in an eco-lodge and one night in a hotel in Cantho city.

On day 3 of the tour we were up early for a visit to the Cai Rang Floating Market, if you ever have the chance it’s best to get there early as many tourists make their way from 9am onwards. Children followed us and ran shouting ‘Hello’ at the top of their lungs. It’s a very welcoming place indeed and this type of tour certainly offers an alternative route through the Delta.

If your wallets can stretch that little bit more and you fancy the exercise we’d highly recommend it. 3 days, 2 nights starts at $165/person. View our Notworkrelated write up for this tour here.

4: Laos – Trekking in Tha Khaek

We booked this 2 days one night tour through the Thakek tourist information, our guides were called Mii and Sawadee (me and Hello in English) we think they might have made their names up!!

The Tha Kek tourist information office is listed in the Laos Lonely Planet and are far cheaper than rivals Green Discovery Laos. We went to Phu Hin Bun NPA for 2 days including transfers, food, eco-lodge accommodation, cave exploration, hiking and an amazing blue lagoon. The food wasn’t as good as any on the top three tours but we did have 2 very cheeky tour guides who provided us with lots of local knowledge and new card games.

We stayed at a village in the national park and participated in a traditional Baci ceremony. The people on the tour with us were loads of fun too which always adds to the enjoyment factor. We paid $70 per person for this tour. There is no official website for the tourist information office but you can compare similar tours with Green Discovery Laos for the area. For more of how we got on visit the blog post here.

5: Thailand – Boat trip, jungle trek and cave discovery, Khao Sok

A wonderful tour booked at the end of our travels in Asia from our accommodation at Nungs house in Khao Sok National park. The tour cost 1500 Baht each which is around £32, it was difficult to find anything cheaper in the area.

The tour comprised of a one hour transfer to Chiaw Lan Lake where we had an hour long boat journey on a long tail boat via various wildlife and amazing karst peaks. An excellent lunch, kayaks and snacks were included along with a 2 hour jungle trek and exploration of the Tham Nam Thalu Cave. The cave was fantastic, we had no idea what to expect and it certainly thrilled and excited us with rivers flowing throughout, bats and spiders to scare us and a spot of swimming!

This again was a great value tour arriving back at our lodge at around 8pm so we certainly got good time out of it. The tour guide was another cheeky chappy who entertained us along the way. Getting to Khao Sok is fairly easy, we arrived on an overnight train from Bangkok to Surat Thani and ended up getting a minibus to the national park, you can also get a local bus if you don’t mind hanging around and being packed in! Our write up for this tour is feature here.

If you have any comments or further Top Tour Tips you’d like to add, we’d love to hear from you!