October | 2014 | See It Do It Live It

Where the Wild Things Are

Posted by Kylie in Asia, Indonesia, Trip

With only a few days left of our Asian adventure, we had the option of staying in Jakarta for several days or blowing the budget and travelling to Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) to search for wild orangutans. It was a pretty easy decision to make! Its quite tricky to buy flight tickets for Indonesian airlines – they either don’t have a website or they require an Indonesian credit card. Perseverance paid off though, and armed with two tickets we headed to Jakarta airport very early on Monday morning. This particular budget…read more

Bandung

We spent two nights in Bandung, the city where my family lived for 4 years when I was a kid. Its a big, smelly, crowded city so not much of a tourist trap. We decided not to attempt the convoluted public transport trip to see the hugely overpriced volcano or hot springs just north of town and opted to go shopping instead!

Yogyakarta

The first thing we saw in Yogyakarta was a half naked lady, squatting in the middle of a busy bridge, doing a poo into a plastic bag. Things could only get better! Fortunately, they did. We managed to negotiate the local transport system and get ourselves to Borobudur, a ninth century Buddhist temple. The temple lay forgotten, buried under a layer of ash and jungle for hundreds of years, before being rediscovered by Thomas Stamford Raffles. Now, it has been restored to its former glory. We spent an hour exploring…read more

Mount Bromo

With two backpacks and two passports in our possession, we were ready for our trip through Java. Our minibus left Kuta at 10 am and then we spent the next 5 hours driving to the north of Bali. We passed through some nice countryside and past lots of beaches, confirming our suspiscion that Kuta is not the best bit of Bali! It was comfortable, newish bus and there was only us two and two Indonesian ladies on it, giving us plenty of room to stretch out. We then had to…read more

The story of calamity Kylie and a bungling boat company

It should have been so straightforward: a boat transfer from Gili Air to Padang Bai (Bali) and then a minibus transfer to Kuta. This is the reverse of the journey we had taken a week previously, which went very smoothly. The return trip was slightly more eventful…. When our boat arrived at Gili Air, they loaded everyones bags into the hold first before boarding the passengers. We watched Graham’s bag go on first and mine a short while later. We then got onto our rather busy boat and sat on…read more

Bali and the Gili Islands

Bali Our first stop in Indonesia was Bali. We landed in the evening and found ourselves in one of the most overcrowded and pointlessly bureaucratic airports of our trip so far. We had to line up in no fewer than four separate long, and infuriatingly slow, queues to get a visa, go through immigration, hand in a customs form and get our luggage scanned. We were lucky and avoided the baggage collection queue as we had flown with just hand luggage. We then found a taxi, but apparently our driver…read more

The Lion City

Evidently Kylie was quite taken by Singapore first time around as she was happy to return there for a few days with me before we set off for Indonesia. We took the 10 hour bus journey straight from the Cameron Highlands to Singapore. As we queued briefly in the sparkling clean, air-conditioned immigration room at the border crossing we couldn’t help but contrast it to some of the more ‘rustic’ immigration facilities we’d experienced in Africa. Arriving in the evening, we swiftly dropped our bags and walked down to the…read more

Back to school

30 years ago I arrived in the Cameron Highlands, aged 5 yrs 11 mths, to start my primary education at a little boarding school in the middle of the jungle called Chefoo school. I have so many happy memories of my six years at this school and I felt an appropriately child-like excitement about returning to this magical land of my childhood. The Cameron Highlands is, as you might have guessed, high up – the climate while we were there was not dissimilar to a rather damp Spring week in…read more

The Perhentian Islands

The Perhentian Islands are a tropical paradise situated off the north-east coast of Malaysia. I headed there on my own for a week of sunshine and swimming. There are two main islands: Perhentian Kecil and Perhentian Besar. I had read that Kecil was popular with backpackers whereas Besar was aimed at couples and families. As I am travelling solo, I decided to get the boat to Kecil. My speed boat left the mainland at 7 am, so during the journey I could watch the sun rise over the islands. The…read more

Chaos in Kuala Lumpur

From Singapore I flew to Kuala Lumpur. When I arrived it was raining and it carried on raining all evening. I was staying in a dorm room in Sunshine Bedz Hostel and was lucky enough to be put in a room with a really nice group of German girls. I joined them for a street food dinner, and then headed out for a drink in the evening. The next day the weather had cleared up so I could go and explore the city. My first job was to purchase a…read more