This is a special entry, not about a place we've been to but an item we're carrying that has become very close to Sarah's heart. Her back-pack.

Purchased in a market in Hanoi in April for the princely sum of £6, this '100% Athentic' (sic) North Face back-pack has now travelled with us across 3 continents over the last 8 months.

It started to show its quality two weeks after purchase, when the handle on the top of the bag fell off. About two weeks later, a large tear opened up in the material on the front of the bag, just below the wonky North Face logo. Luckily, Sarah has been saving up Christmas cracker sewing kits for the last three years, and was therefore able to stitch up the hole in an attractive 'drunken trainee surgeon' style with snazzy blue and white thread. This process has been repeated once every couple of weeks as more of the cheap nylon material around the stitching tears away.

Next the shoulder straps started to give way. These were fixed using a combination of stitching and black duck tape, that nicely sets off the blue and grey colour scheme of the rest of the bag.

In Australia we lost one of the zippers, but were able to make do with the one left over, which only falls off occasionally and can easily be reattached in a quick 5-minute procedure.

In New Zealand the metal support bars built into the back of the back suddenly decided to invert themselves, sticking painfully into Sarah's back. Through brute force we were able to bend them back into roughly their original concave position.

In Chile the zip teeth began to misfire, so that once a day or so the bag wouldn't do up and we had to run the zippers back and forth from side to side until they finally caught and started to work again.

Then as we walked around the Lake District in Bariloche, we heard a ripping noise and discovered that the breathable mesh back support had torn from top to bottom. Figuring this only made it more breathable, we left it as is.

What I thought was the last straw came in Ushuaia whilst we were trekking through the Tierra del Fuego National Park. The zips themselves finally fell off, and the bag fell open scattering our food over the forest floor. So that we could make it to the end of the trail, I tied the bag up with a scarf and we pressed on. Sarah was clearly upset, but I told her that the bag had had a long life, and we would buy her a better one as soon as we got back to the shops the next day.

The next day I awoke to a grin the size of a Cheshire Cat, and with bleary eyes watched as Sarah unveiled the ultimate expression of her worrying new make-do-and-mend mentality. She explained that she had found a number of buttons in the sewing kits along with the needles and thread last night, and had had a brain-wave. Instead of a zip, the mouth of the bag is now closed by means of a system of buttons around which you loop short lengths of strap that were re-purposed from a pair of her trousers. It really is quite ingenious. Over the course of the last week these straps have distintegrated into a loose weave of threads, but these can still be wound round and round the buttons to close the bag.

I only hope that Franken-bag makes it home, otherwise I think Sarah may have some kind of breakdown.