After a brief stop at Singapore Airport, we caught our flight to Malaysian Borneo. First stop was the capital of the Sarawak region, Kuching. We spent our first few days doing day walks at the nearby national parks of Damai and Bako. The Damai Beach walk was unexpectedly challenging - see the very uphill photos! We also used Kuching for our base to visit the nearby Semenkoh Orangutan Rehabilitaion Centre (see the separate blog entry). Luckily for us, we timed ou...

On a high after Mt Bromo, we set sail again and landed on Bali. After 2 weeks of being the only white people, we were a little overwhelmed to arrive in the Australian settlement of Kuta! We wandered around the shops, watched the surfers and chilled out trying some curries. We also had a disappointing afternoon watching England get beaten by New Zealand in the rugby. Even more upsetting were the only other two England supporters sat in the bar enjoying a fruit jui...

After brief stop in Singapore, we took the early morning ferry from Singapore to Balam. Our original plan had been to catch the next ferry to Pekanbaru on mainland Indonesia but the ferry had already left! So we made a split second decision to catch the only remaining ferry of the day to Dumai (also on mainland Indonesia) and jumped 'James Bond" style onto the boat as it was pulling away from the harbour! After 8 hours sailing we arrived at the port and made...

We headed South from Halong Bay making a couple of stops at Hue, Hoi An and the beach town of Nha Trang before arriving at Ho Chi Minh City. Some of the journeys were pretty extreme on overnight bed buses which are actually more like dentist chair buses! We took a day trip to visit the Cao Dai Temple which was started by none other than Victor Hugo and is basically a mix of Hinduism, Buddhism and Catholism all rolled into one. We watched a service in the bright...

We set sail from Halong City to sail amongst the giant limestone islands in Halong Bay. We lived it up yet again on our air conditioned sail boat that unfortunately had no concept of what the term 'vegetarian' meant! Caroline challenges you to eat eggs for 4 consecutive meals followed by lettuce in a bowl of boiling water (with added supernoodles) and not be a little annoyed! The day started with a "welcome drink" - translated "1 inch of fanta in ...