My aching legs feel heavy as lead, my hip bones sting as 15 kilos of backpack bites into skin already rubbed raw. It’s four days since my last wash and two hours since I wolfed down a bowl of porridge and cup of tea at 6am. Yet I’m smiling from ear to ear, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

I'm writing in shock at the fact that we are back in Bangkok on our last night in Asia, leaving for Sydney tomorrow. It doesn't seem long enough ago that we were here the first time, realising that our return to this crazy sweatbucket was goodbye Asia, hello Sydney.

The sombre mood of Phnom Penh's genocide museum was followed the next day by a 6 hour white knuckle speedboat ride up the Tonle Sap river to Siem Reap. As with all transport in Cambodia, the boat left at 7:00am. This time there were 2 boats, and they had over-sold both, just in case it wasn't complicated enough.

Steve last wrote from the dusty, one-road Thai town of Chiang Khong, on the northern border with Laos. Since then we have spent 2 weeks or so in Laos PDR and arrived in the Cambodian nether-lands last Friday, making our way to our current location of Phnom Penh.

Here we are in chiang khong on the thailand-laos border, sitting beside the Mekong river (very idyllic). Tomorrow morning we cross into the Lao People's not very Democratic Republic but, before we do that, just a short (yeah, right) mail to let you know what we've been up to since the last time Annabel wrote... We left xi'an (seems like months ago now) and got the train to beijing.

We're back! We have now been stumbling around mainland China for just over 3 weeks, in a somewhat exasperating fashion thanks firstly to the incomprehensibility of Mandarin Chinese, and also to a few other soon to be explained cultural differences.

It is amazing how quickly it has come around, but later this evening we will be departing the shores of south america at the end of this the first leg of our little adventure. It's been amazing, but i'll get to the emotional bit later as first i'm going to tell you what's been happening since our last mail from chile (writes Steve)

Yes, for anyone who was bored enough to remember our South American itinerary, we know we weren't supposed to go to Chile. But here we are, in San Pedro de Atacama just over the border with Bolivia, relaxing for a few days before returning to Bolivia via Argentina.

So, where did we leave you? I think we had just survived the freezing slopes of Cotopaxi and were about to escape what would seem to be every LatAm traveller's least favourite city, Quito. (writes Steve, Annabel's husband and co-adventure seeker)

Surprising as it may seem, we've survived both the first three weeks of married life and the fact that over two of those have been virtually solely in each other's company. Needless to say, we now feel the need to communicate with others, which makes you lot the lucky recipients of our outpourings (mine on this occasion at least). Read on to get a flavour of our best and worst moments so far, plus a few Ecuadorian surprises the Lonely Planet hadn't quite prepared us for...