A Sunny Weekend for a Wedding in Durham

This year, Mitch and I don’t have any travel plans (can you believe it!?). This is mainly due to the fact that we’ve just moved to Croydon and Mitch has embarked on a new job. While my job allows me to work remotely, Mitch’s does not, anymore, so, we’ve moved into a lovely little flat and are enduring the life of rent, bills and complaining about Southern Rail. However, despite having no lavish plans to hop on a plane somewhere, our year is filled with many great events throughout the UK. We have five weddings this year and the first …

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Being Back Home in Bristol

On Friday 25th November, Mitch and I touched down in the UK after being away for fifteen months. We lived in China for ten months and travelled for another five. We had the luxury of visiting Vietnam, Laos, South Korea, Canada (albeit briefly) and the USA.  However, now I’m back in my hometown of Bristol. To be honest, I was looking forward to coming home. That’s not to say I haven’t adored where we’ve been and what we’ve done. I’m so happy and am so grateful to been able to have our lifestyle. But fifteen months is a long time to …

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Travel Planning, Blogging, and Life Post-China

I love planning. I love lists, researching and organising, and I love the implementing of said plan. However, with travelling, I’ve come to realise that planning only gets you so far, and then you just have to go with the flow. Mitch and I planned to go to Vietnam together two years ago, but unexpected eye surgery got in the way of that. When we travel, we have vague plans, and that’s what I like. We finish our teaching jobs here in China at the end of June. Naturally, we have begun to talk about our plan for afterwards. We’ll …

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Welcome to Helen The Bristolian Backpacker

Hello! Thank you so much for visiting Helen The Bristolian Backpacker. The site use be a wordpress blog but I’ve now transformed it to give you, my wonderful readers, a better experience as I share more of my backpacking stories. The site is still very new but is always developing as I add new content and lots more great stuff. As a budget backpacker, I want to share information about places with you, and some tales along the way too! Please let me know your thoughts and comments below – What do you like? What would you like to see more of? …

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Top 3 Reasons To Visit Vietnam

I travelled for six weeks around Vietnam in August and September 2014. I am finally going to share some thoughts with you about it. Here are my quick fire reasons for Vietnam being a must place to visit. Cost I’m generally a budget traveller so finding somewhere cheap to stay and go is important for me. Although the flights may be expensive, once you arrive in Vietnam, nothing else will be. Accommodation in a hostel with breakfast can be $5 a night (£3.20), and some even cheaper. Although I never stayed at the cheapest, they were still cheap, clean and …

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Novels and Travelling

I found an English book shop in Hanoi, Vietnam, and for reasons I can’t recall, I ended up buying ‘Until I find you’ by John Irving. The book accompanied me on my travels, I finally finished it about five weeks later in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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