MALAYSIA
Penang
We set a new personal record when we arrived in Penang, we had been in three countries in one day – quite impressive! We had decided that as we had been travelling for over a year now it was about time that we did some work and so the plan for Malaysia and Singapore was to get my new website up and running. (It’s not completely ready yet so I’m not telling you the address!!)

For the week that we were there we stuck to our decision about working and except for a few hours one day we worked solidly, even going a for 28 hours straight at one point!!! Our one morning of sightseeing took us on a walk around Little India and Chinatown, and to Penang Fort.

The Fort was fun as I got to put Jon in jail, he did manage to unlock the door though which was a little disappointing as I thought it would be fun to leave him there for a few hours – he he… The walk around Little India and Chinatown was not the most exciting of things, plus we weren’t used to being outside so nothing really to report!

Singapore
If you have a lot of money to spend, Singapore would be an amazing place to go to. We had a great time wandering around the streets, Zoo and the Botanical Gardens, looking in fancy shops that we couldn’t buy anything in and eating the biggest burger known to man!

The skyscrapers were quite impressive in some areas and for most of our time here we just wandered in and out of shopping malls looking at them! Plus if you aren’t shopping in Singapore there isn’t very much to do!

On our second day we headed to the Botanical Gardens (mainly so I could get some plant stock photography!) and it turned out to be a great day, for the most part we had blue skies and the park itself was really nice and relaxing, except when we got sort of lost in the pre-historic section – we were trying to find the way out but it never seemed to appear and it was getting hotter and hotter and we had no drink, oops…

The Zoo day was definitely the best, I don’t know why but I think it’s impossible to not have fun in a zoo! I won’t bore you with animal details, all you need to know is we had a great day (apart from getting stuck for an hour when it decided to rain) and got lots of photos for my stock venture!!

We found a restaurant in one of the thousand shopping malls that sold a burger big enough for four people (we were really hungry after Myanmar so figured we could polish it off!). The picture really doesn’t do this thing justice but take our word for it, it was massive!

Kuala Lumpur
Again, sticking to the ‘work’ idea, we just worked! We did nip out to see the Petronas Towers but as it was Chinese New Year the place was heaving and most things were closed – so apart from the towers we didn’t do anything!! We did get a pizza delivered though which was extremely novel, Dominos pizza delivered to your hostel door in 25 minutes!!

INDONESIA
Jakarta
After a very quick flight, a taxi ride and no sleep we arrived in the backpackers section of Jakarta. It was one of the most miserable and horrible places we have been yet. All of the ‘helpful’ tour agencies charged tourists 10 times what the locals paid and wouldn’t help you at all, the hotel we stayed in wouldn’t help as they were trying to send all the tourists to a dodgy tour agency and it rained solidly… Eventually we found out from another traveller just to go to the train station and try our luck there, we did get a train to get us out of ‘hell’ but we obviously had to pay for the highest class… At least we had a way out and I know we never have to go back!

Yogyakarta
We went to Yogya for two reasons, one was Borobudur and the other was access to Mt. Bromo. We booked on a trip to Borobudur and some other place but the weather was awful so we spent most of our time drinking coffee, pretty much a waste of time, if the weather had done something other than rain and be grey it may have been a different story, but it wasn’t… We left the next day for Mt. Bromo.

Mt. Bromo
After much faffing around (we hate tour agencies…) we made it up to the volcano at about 7pm. We booked the essential jeep and hoped for good weather the following morning. In fairness to the weather it didn’t rain but the clouds still came in and covered the volcano about 1 hour after sunrise, grrr… It was still great to see though and after we had watched the sunrise from the viewpoint, we headed over to the crater for a closer look. Being totally lazy we decided to get horses to take us up there and bring us back down, that certainly cheered us (or me) up, Jon on a horse is a funny sight!

Kuta
As far as Bali goes, this is known as the tackiest beach resort on the whole island, not surprisingly we booked a bus and boat combo to take us to the tiny island of Gili Meno for the day after we arrived!

Gili Meno
The island itself is very small and when we arrived there was a sum total of 8 people on it, we found a nice room and waited for the rain to stop. After being on the island for over a week and having only one day without rain we decided enough was enough and got the boat back over to Lombok, this is where things went a little wrong!

When we got back on to the mainland we were told the ferries back to Bali had been cancelled due to high waves, not a big deal for us as we had 10 days before we had to catch the flight to Sydney. We checked into a nice hotel and sat around waiting for a phone call telling us that the ferries were back up and running. The following morning we were told the ferries were ready to go and off we went assuming that it would now be safe – oops… All was going well on our little ferry until someone at the back got a little scared after some hairy sideways rocks and ran for a life jacket, that set everyone off and before we knew it, it went a little crazy. The westerners who were on the boat didn’t see what the big commotion was about, it was a little scary when the waves got bigger but we didn’t think we were going over anyway! After all the commotion it calmed down again and 4 long hours later we were on solid ground, a relief as I’m sure you can imagine!

Kuta
Our last destination in Indonesia before a flight back to the real world, Kuta is not the most exciting of places as I said earlier but as we spent the whole last week sat by the pool that didn’t matter to us! Seriously, that’s all we did, no stories and no trips, one week by a pool!

The End of Asia, 14 Months Later…
Over the past year we have been to some amazing places, some of which we loved and then there were some that we hated! It would take too long to go over everywhere and say what we enjoyed the most, for those of you who read the blog you’ll have a good enough idea anyway!

We had planned on staying in Asia for another year, seeing more of Central Asia, but we came to the decision a couple of weeks ago that we fancy a change of scenery, so after Australia and New Zealand, we fly to South America! We’re really excited about it and have no idea what we’re going to do when we get there but I’m sure it will be just as good as our travels so far…