ALASTAIR + LALEINIA

When I was booking the trip and figuring out the flights, it occurred to me that we were going to be much closer to Australia than usual (yet still an 8-hour flight away), and so I did some searching and found really cheap flights to and from Sydney! Unsure of when we will be down this way again I booked the tickets, hoping to keep it a secret from Lain until we were in Asia. Unfortunately, Lain found out that day when she got an email confirming her e-visa. Didn't think that one through too well! Anyways, after a long day of travel, we finally got to our hotel by about 11pm, after taking a ferry from Sydney to Manly. When I googled Sydney to Manly I saw it was a 43-minute walk, perfect... Apart from the 43 minutes mostly being on a ferry! Strictly walking was about 3 hours or something. Ah well, can't be all that bad commuting on a ferry through the Sydney harbor. And what was cool was that it went right between the harbor bridge and the opera house! We knew th...

Next stop was Kuala Lumpur. We arrived pretty jetlagged so took a nap for a couple of hours, which turned into more than we'd expected! Ah well! Since it was late in the evening when we woke up, we decided to head over to a night market for some food! We went to the Jalan Alone market and had some of the best noodles, meat, rice, mango smoothies, all sorts of Asian stuff! It was awesome, I think we sat down to eat at about midnight and there was still plenty of hustle and bustle going on - awesome. We bought Emre some toy airplanes and he kept occupied by spinning them to see who would be the winner with the plane pointing to them! The next day we woke up quite late and headed over to Batu Caves, which involved climbing a lot of steep stairs and entering into a cave/temple and seeing a load of shrines - except most were under construction/renovation. It was quite cool though, but unfortunately we know nothing of the history and culture, etc, which is a bad move on our ...

Since we were a ferry away from Indonesia, we decided to get away from the expensive Singapore and relax in Batam. It was about an hour away, on boat. We arrived really early in the morning, so we ended up sleeping on a couch in the Singapore airport. Around 6 am, we decided to get a ride to catch our boat. Eventually, we made it to our hotel. We changed out of our clothes, put on our swimsuits, and headed to the pool. There was a spa conveniently placed right next to the pool, so I decided to treat myself to a manicure and haircut. The humidity was getting to me and I really missed having short hair, so I hacked off a few inches. No big deal. After that, things started to get pretty bad, health wise. I caught a cold and I was feeling pretty horrible. Alastair took emre to the pool while I stayed in bed to rest. We were heading to Cambodia and I didn't want anything to mess it up for me, especially my health! So, lots of resting, room service, and some weird herbal tea.