Kuala Lumpur

Cross­ing the street is best done with both eyes closed and a prayer book in hand, as you try to dodge trucks, cars, irate taxi dri­vers and motor­bikes. The pedes­trian green light, a flash­ing ani­mated lit­tle stick fig­ure that runs, sums it all up: run like hell.

Going to Malaysia

An exit stamp later, and we were out. Enter­ing Malaysia was sim­i­larly easy: no ques­tions were asked and we were given a three-month per­mit on the spot. The only creepy fac­tor was the huge posters every­where that read “death by hang­ing for drug traffickers”.

A Foodie's Day in S'pore

I’m lucky to have a strong stom­ach and a taste for street food. I’m not a huge fan of “weird” meat (i.e. intestines and the like) but I can eat pretty much any­thing else. You can’t really apply West­ern health stan­dards to Asian street food but I’m per­fectly fine with that. Who wants to live in a taste­less san­i­tized world, anyway?

A Secret Affair

At 11 p.m., we sud­denly real­ized we’d bet­ter print the Kuala Lumpur hotel book­ing con­fir­ma­tion we had just made online. Obvi­ously, we don’t carry a printer with us (although I some­times wish we did) so we had to find an Inter­net café.

Singapore's Chinatown

And this is where my per­cep­tion of Sin­ga­pore sud­denly changed. Just a cou­ple of blocks from all the main West­ern finan­cial insti­tu­tions, we stepped into another world.

Bye Australia, Hello Singapore

Asia has such a unique atmos­phere that best way to adapt is to embrace the crowd, the smell and dive into the chaos with­out look­ing back.

We landed in Sin­ga­pore under pour­ing rain, after a whole day of trav­el­ing and two crazy last days in Sydney.

10 Stuff We Learned in Australia

We bused about 3,000 kilo­me­ters along the East Coast, from trop­i­cal Queens­land to New South Wales. We drove another 1,000 kilo­me­ters South of Syd­ney and out of the beaten tracks. We walked on dozens of beaches, escaped the floods by a cou­ple of days, spent New Year Eve in Syd­ney and Christ­mas at the beach.
And of course, we learned a few things along the way.

Canberra

Aus­tralians are quick to dis­miss their cap­i­tal and I don’t think I have ever heard any­body brag­ging about being from Can­berra. Indeed, the state of ATC (Aus­tralia Cap­i­tal Ter­ri­tory) is tiny and Can­berra is usu­ally not on the back­packer trail—we didn’t go last time we were in Oz in 2003.
But this week, we had a car and time in our hands, so we took the moun­tain road to the cap­i­tal to see what it looked like.