As I write this, it is almost four months since we got back from SE Asia.

We spent the first two weeks that we were back in South Africa in Port Elizabeth settling back into our off-road camper (aka ORC), spending time with family (our son and his family live in PE as well as my mother and Leigh's sister and her husband) and sorting out a few some business issues. Then we travelled up to Durban to spend ten days with our daughter and her family after which we travelled up to Kruger National Park where, apart from a short trip to Ponta do Oura in Mozambique to meet up with my mother and my sister for a few days, we have been since the begining of August.

To get a glimpse of what we have been doing in the Kruger National Park, here's a YouTube clip:

All of this time we have been hankering to get back on our bikes in some far off country. What makes it worse is that while we are in Kruger NP, we cannot use our bicycles.

So we have started planning for our next cycle tour, and the one following that one, and the one following that etc etc.

If all goes to plan we will be in Japan at the end of May next year cycling down to Fukuoka to catch the ferry to South Korea from where will will take a ferry to Beijing and finally flying back to South Africa from Hong Kong after about four months on the road.

The year after that we should be in the UK visiting friends and doing John o'Groats to Lands End before taking a ferry to France to cycle down to Spain along one of the El Camino de Santiago routes. This has suddenly entered our plans because negociations are apparantly taking place that will ease the travel restrictions on South Africans in both the UK as well as the Schengen countries in Europe. The original plan was to do South America, which could still be a fallback should the visa negociations go awry.

The year after that is Sri Lanka because that is when the next South African cricket tour to that country is scheduled. When we were in Sri Lanka in 2013 we got our timing badly wrong - the South African cricket team flew in as we flew out. Apart from watching South Africa play cricket in Sri Lanka we also have some more birdwatching we want to do there. We will probably combine this with some time in India.

With all this touring planned, we have realised that an upgrade to our bikes is not a bad idea. It looks like we will be settling on Rohloff hubbed Thorn Raven's (http://www.thorncycles.co.uk/bikes).

In between all of this we plan to do shorter tours in South Africa - a tour of winelands of the Western Cape is on the cards for February next year to prepare us for the Far East trip.