Handy travel hint: Getting through airports is made a lot easier when you’ve got a child in a wheelchair. Those people that push you around the airport know every single way to jump a queue and get you settled in a lounge quickly. Much better than one of the swanky Gold cards!

After 7 months on the road, since July 16th last year, we’re finally leaving the luxury of the ‘developed world’. We deliberately chose to visit “easy” countries first – Canada, the USA, Fiji, Australia and New Zealand were all fairly easy to travel around, and we were on familiar ground. By now, the pattern of backpacking has settled down, and we’re all used to the style of travel that results from there being four of us rather than just two, like last time we did this. But when we wake up tomorrow the girls will wake up in Singapore, and pretty soon afterwards we’ll hopefully be heading up the isthmus to Malaysia and Thailand. Although they’re not as difficult to travel around as India or China, we will be off the beaten track for a while, getting away from the resorts on the west coast. And the heat and humidity will be worse than we’ve experienced for a prolonged period elsewhere, so we’re all waiting slightly nervously to see how it goes. And then we can tell you!