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.

The Grand Pacific Drive (III)

We finally found a lit­tle par­adise, 500 kilo­me­ters from Syd­ney and 700 kilo­me­ters from Mel­bourne: the lit­tle town of Narooma, on the Euro­bo­dalla Coast. Con­ve­niently located far enough from the two big cities, Narooma man­ages to retain some of its local charm and it’s not too swamped by Aus­tralian holidaymakers.

The Grand Pacific Drive (II)

To get there, we had to take a steep climb up a moun­tain road. Dur­ing the first half of the climb, the nar­row strip of asphalt crossed the Kan­ga­roo Val­ley, where there seems to be more wom­bats than kan­ga­roos, accord­ing to the numer­ous yel­low diamond-shaped warn­ing signs for wildlife crossing.

The Grand Pacific Drive (I)

After New Year, we decided to rent a car to get off the beaten track and go where Grey­hound doesn’t, South of Syd­ney, fol­low­ing the Grand Pacific Drive.