Leaving Manado, North Sulawesi, our plan was to fly back to Jakarta for one night and stay in an airport-type hotel to avoid the expensive return trip into the capital (not to mention the pollution, touts, and other annoyances), before … Continue reading
Java Our tour of Indonesia began with an 8 hour train ride to Yogyakarta – central Java's main hub. Whilst Jakarta is the archipelago's financial and political center, Yogyakarta is often seen as the cultural capital. Waiting on the platform … Continue reading
Singapore From Tioman Island, we ferried back to the mainland and eventually boarded a delayed bus to the Malaysia-Singapore border town of Johor Bahru. The border crossing into Singapore was possibly the most efficient and easiest of our trip so … Continue reading
PenangNorthwest Malaysia Our first stop in Malaysia was the northwestern island of Penang, where our plane from Laos landed amidst a spectacular lightening storm just before midnight. Upon arrival, we were soon whisked away by taxi to the island’s capital, Georgetown. … Continue reading
A one hour flight took us from Bangkok to Yangon, the capital of Myanmar. We arrived at the small international airport and entered into a terminal building still being built – literally a four storey grey concrete shell. We then … Continue reading
Forcing ourselves away from the beach, we caught a 15-hour train from Goa to the city of Kochi in Kerala. The train was of course delayed (by 2 hours) but there were plenty of bats swooping low past our ears … Continue reading
Our first stop in the region was Jaipur – a six-hour train ride away from Agra. Unfortunately our unlucky streak with Indian trains continued. Our train was scheduled to depart at 6:15 am, so we got up at 4:30am and … Continue reading
We spent the first couple of days in Kathmandu recovering from our trip to the Annapurna region and getting re-acquainted with the much-noisier and polluted streets of the city. Our next goal was to arrange a river rafting trip to … Continue reading
Our first 3 or 4 days in Nepal were spent relaxing on what we have termed ‘admin days’ – ie, days spent catching up on sleep, doing laundry, writing emails, reading guide books and planning our next set of traveling … Continue reading
The Tibetan Plateau is shown below; our route to Nepal would take us from Lhasa, through Gyantse, Shigaste, Everest Base Camp and down through the border to Kathmandu. Day 1: Lhasa to Gyantse At 8:42 am, we departed Lhasa in … Continue reading