Day 13 - January 19, 2010

This morning we started with a nice hike up Bukit Timah, the highest peak in Singapore. It is 163.8 M to the top. We saw a huge spider, some ants carrying an earthworm, and some cool birds and trees. Of course, we didn't see monkeys, because there is a curse on Ali who wants to see monkeys, so they are in hiding until she leaves.

For lunch, we took Kristy to a German Thai restaurant and did a little last minute shopping. Then we came home and finished packing up.

It is off to the airport and Kim is heading home and Ali is heading to New Zealand. Ali will continue to post pics and info about New Zealand over the next two weeks but it might not be on a regular basis! :) Good-bye SE Asia!

Day 12 - January 18, 2010

This morning we woke up and took a taxi to Johor, Malaysia. It was about a 10 minute taxi ride and about 20 minutes through the immigration stop. When we arrived, we walked through Johor to the Sultan Abu Bakar's palace. Along the way, we saw several abandoned houses, it is very rundown, similar to other boarder towns.

We also saw the courthouse, which we managed to stay out of and a TGI Fridays! :) We finally arrived at the palace and saw just how huge it was. The grounds cover a few city blocks. The Sultan had abandoned this house to build a new one, because he thought everything was too old. The palace is still used for different events throughout the year. It was also creepy that members of the royal family who pass, their bodies are placed on the Sultan's old bed for people to pay their respects before the person is buried.

You can see all of the pictures below, but we saw the living quarters, dining hall, where they hold ceremonies, and the sultan was an avid hunter, so we also saw his prize room along with jewelry, clothing, china, and several more things. One of the pics shows Kim sitting at one of the tables. She was a rebel and stepped over the rope, but the pic didn't turn out too well. She managed to stay out of jail though! :)

After the palace tour, we went to lunch at the New Hong Kong restaurant and had a fabulous Chinese meal! Then it was back to Singapore to see Lisa the neighbor's extraordinary fish tank and to start packing up our stuff.

This evening, we went to the Night Safari. We had some dinner and watched a great jungle dance show. We will get the video up on YouTube tomorrow for you. It was a lot of fun. Then we got to see several nocturnal animals. Our camera didn't work taking pictures in the dark with no flash, so we bought some postcard pics. Ali will see if she can scan them in the morning so you can see some of the cool animals we got to see. It is sad, as many of them are going extinct as more and more rain forests are cut down.

After the safari, we came home and went to bed. Only one more day in Singapore. Jeffrey, Kristy, Declan, Keira, Nancy, and Lena have been wonderful hosts and tour guides, we are going to miss them!

Here are our pics and videos from the day!

Day 11 - January 17, 2010

Today was our day of rest. We started out the day at the condo pool for coffee and gossip with the "Real Housewives of Dairy Farm"(Dairy Farm is the name of the condos); however, Lisa (one of the housewives) was supposed to bring coffee, but slept in with a hangover from too much fun at our dinner last night. We had fun hanging by the pool and then came back and showered.

We went to a nice lunch at Picotoin, a little bar/restaurant/family fun center. We had a delicious meal and then walked by the horse stables and saw a couple of horses. Kristy and Jeff's kids are going to take riding lessons there this spring.

After lunch we napped and read, just had a nice day of being lazy. We ate leftover chicken from last night for dinner and a few of the neighborhood kids came over and we made smores on the bbq. Most people here have never heard of smores and only one store in all of Singapore sells graham crackers so the kids had a blast. Declan lost a tooth eating a smore and accidentally swallowed it, but he wrote the tooth fairy a letter so she should still be coming tonight.

After dinner, we all watched the movie "Saint Jack" which shows Singapore, before it became a big metropolis. It was an interesting movie to see the old Singapore and see some of the traditions of her people.

Here are a couple of pics from our day of relaxation!

Day 10 - January 16, 2010

This morning we woke up to a yummy American breakfast cooked by Nancy! Then we went on a tour of Little India this morning. They were having their harvest fest today and had some different activities going on.

We started at the largest wet market in Singapore. They call it this because the floor is usually wet. There were a little less than 100 meat, fruit and vegetable, spices, and fish stores that sold fresh food for the local restaurants and anyone else who wanted to buy it. They had almost every kind of fish, mutton, fruit, vegetable, pork, and spice you could imagine from all over the world in this market. It was interesting to watch them butcher the meats, but we were beginning to think about becoming vegetarians after a couple of hours in the market.



Then we walked around the shops of Little India. It is amazing to see the various, textiles, shoes, religious gods, souvineers, and more spices. They favor the color gold and pretty much all of the jewelry and religious items were made of 24K gold.

After walking around, we went into an Indian Temple. It was very interesting to watch them pray to their various gods. They have several and depending on what is happening in your life you can pray to specific ones. We saw a couple of different ceremonies as well. You can see all of the various gods in our pictures below.

After the temple we walked over to an Indian restaurant for lunch. There are several types of Indian food based on the part of India you are from. Jeff really wanted us to try a fish head and this restaurant has served the most fish heads out of any restaurant in the world. We were told this is a Singapore meal and you won't find it in many other countries. We ordered a small fish head in curry and also tried some Naan Bread, Spinach, and some type of Indian flavored chicken. It was all really good, even the fish head (even though, we mostly ate the neck and the end of the fish head). Kim is now calling Ali the fish head queen because she ate part of the actual head behind the eye ball. It was just a white fish and just tasted like fish, not as bad as the Durien.

After lunch, we came back and relaxed. We got caught up on uploading all of our pics from the trip so far and helped Kristy with her scrapbooking stuff. For dinner, Jeff and Declan bbq'd a Beer Butt Chicken and a couple other chickens, and a couple of the neighborhood families came over. We had a great evening of food and fun!

Below are the pics from the day!

Day 9 - January 15, 2010

We are back in Singapore now, we got in late last night. Ali was up at the crack of dawn and enjoyed a nice breakfast cooked by the wonderful Nancy while Kim slept in all morning! We were exhausted and kind of lazy this morning, although, we did get caught up on uploading more of our pics, hopefully by tomorrow we will have them all up for everyone.

After we finally got ready, we went to lunch with our cousin Jeffery and five of his old co-workers. We had a great lunch of beer and fish and chips at a local microbrewery on the water. It was a lot of fun to meet true Singaporeans (and one Malaysian). They were all lawyers from a firm that works with pesticides around the world. We learned a lot, had a good lunch and a good time!

Then it was off to explore Sentosa Island. This is a small island off of the Singapore mainland. We took the monorail over and explored the island. It is starting to look like a Disneyland for adults and will soon be a mini Las Vegas. They are building two new casinos on the island and six hotels and lots of shopping. The worlds largest dual track roller coaster is also being built. Most of the things open next Wednesday, too bad we leave on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning! :( Right now there are still a lot of things to do, especially for kids. They have a few 4D movie adventures, a butterfly and bug habitat, a nature walk, etc. We rode to the top of the Tiger Tower and were able to get a great view of the city. (The tower kind of reminds us a little of the Space Needle, but it is just a rotating room that goes up and down every ten minutes).

After our ride, we took a hike down to the beaches of Sentosa. There were a couple of resorts that we visited. On our way to the beach, we saw a peacock roaming around, it was beautiful. When we got to the beach, we discovered they had built two new surfing/wave machines where you could practice surfing. It looked like a lot of fun, but we didn't have our swim suits, so we couldn't try it out! :( So we decided to walk down to the beach instead. We stuck our toes in the Indian Ocean and then looked out on the coast and got to see Indonesia.

Also, there were millions of boats, oil rigs. There are a ton of refineries just off of the coast of Singapore. It was interesting to learn that Singapore has added an extra 15% to the country's landmass with sand from Indonesia and Malaysia. So the country is physically growing in size and population. As you will see in the pictures, they are very protective of the oil and refineries and there are boats that roam the sea with machine guns protecting everything.

After our history lesson from Jeffrey, we walked up through another resort and then took a taxi to Chinatown. It was amazing. They are getting ready for the Chinese new year which starts in 3 weeks. Today is the first day of the last month of the year. 2010 is the year of the tiger! Chinatown was filled with red decorations for people to hang in their houses. We learned that the new year celebration started when a monster used to scare people. They found out he was scared of the color red and loud noises so the following year they decided to have a large celebration with a lot of red and loud fireworks to keep the monster away! We ate at a traditional Chinese Sheshwan Restaurant. It was delicious and makes American Chinese restaurants look bad! :)

After some people watching and shopping, we went on a tour of the Red Light District in Chinatown. Our tour guide gave us the history of prostitution in Singapore and then took us all throughout Chinatown, giving us some history of the area as well as how prostitution has affected it over the years. Then we saw a few brothels and went to a meat market (this was a little joke at the end). It was very interesting and a different side of Singapore which we were not aware of. Prostitution is legal within the four red light districts (we only visited the one). The brothels are very discreet (you can see them in our pictures, the little buildings at the end with the lighted numbers).

On our way home, Jeffrey had the great idea that we try some durian fruit. It kind of looks like a round pineapple on the outside with prickly spikes all over the outside, and on the inside is a gooey, yellow fruit with a big nut in the middle. People here think this is a delicious exotic fruit. It smells like garbage that a cat has peed on and it pretty much tastes like that too as you will see in our pictures. The little old toothless lady that sold it to us, brought us some mangosteens (small little mango type fruit that was delicious) to take the taste out of our mouths! This is an experience we never want to relive!

We had a very interesting and history filled day. The solar eclipse was supposed to happen at 4:25pm today, but it was a cloudy day, so we were unable to see it, but we tried! :( We are exhausted and off to bed now so we can have some energy to visit Little India tomorrow!

Day 8 - January 14, 2010

Today we decided to take it easy and shop the street markets of Phuket. We slept in (until 6:30am ☺) and then had a nice breakfast at the hotel. When we came back we got to talk to our families through Skype and packed our bags.

We headed on a shopping adventure through the crowded and somewhat smelly streets of downtown Patong. The vendors reminded Ali of other third world countries like Tijuana, Mexico and on Nassau, Bahamas. They do not understand the concept of supply and demand. Each little shop is similar and sells anything from little plastic elephants, t-shirts, bootleg DVDs, and suits. One of the t-shirts put it best “I don’t want a f*@cking Tuk Tuk, Suit or Sarong!” We almost bought one so they would leave us alone. The Tuk Tuk (mini cabs) drivers wanted to take us everywhere, the tailors wanted to make us suits and dresses and they had a ton of beachwear and knock off designer clothes and bags. We got a few souvenirs for family with our excellent bartering skills, but were worn out by the end of the day.

We pretty much walked every inch of Patong, Phuket today. We really enjoyed Thailand, but are ready for some more adventures in Singapore and Malaysia!

Here are a few pics from the day!

Day 7 - January 13, 2010

Today we arrived in paradise. We spent the day in the Similan Islands. These are 9 islands off the coast of Thailand that are one of their national parks. We got to visit 4 of the islands.

We had to get up at 6am for an hour-long shuttle to the jet boats up in northern Phuket (next to the bridge to the mainland). From there, we took a jet boat for a 2-hour ride to the islands. It was a bumpy but beautiful ride.

Nobody lives on the Similan Islands and they are closed for 6 months of the year during the monsoon and typhoon seasons (May through October). The islands are owned by the Thailand government as part of their national park system. People can camp on the islands when they are open, but tours are only available 3 days a week during the 6 months they are open to the public.

The first island we visited, Island 4, we relaxed on the beach and swam in the crystal clear ocean. Ali got stung by something, but it wasn’t a jellyfish like her trip in Hawaii, she was ok after a few minutes, and Kim didn’t even have to pee on her! We also found a little lagoon on the island and we climbed some rocks that surrounded the beach. The white, fine sand was the most luxurious sand either of us had had ever set foot on (if there is such a thing as “luxurious” sand, this was it!)

A two-minute boat ride to the second island brought us to our first snorkeling adventure. We saw some beautiful fish and got to swim around in the Andaman Sea.

The third island brought us a yummy Thai lunch. We had a couple of different kinds of fresh fish, some fish/noodle dish, rice, fried eggs, and soup. During lunch we watched a cheesy Asian soap opera that they had playing on the TVs in the eating area. A local man was also hanging out holding a bat he found in one of the trees. It just slept hanging upside down while he was holding, it, amazing!! After lunch, we sunbathed on the beach and swam in the Andaman Sea some more. The water was beautiful shades of green and blue and was crystal clear.

The final island was another snorkeling adventure. We had more time to swim and see some amazing fish and sea creatures under the sea.

Then it was time to head back to the beaches of Phuket, which are not as great as we had first thought after seeing the Similan Islands. When we arrived back at the hotel, we were exhausted. We watched the Heartbreak Kid on TV while we got ready for dinner. While we were getting ready, we both realized the great pain we were in from being burnt to a crisp. Kim’s shoulders and legs are fried, and pretty much every inch of Ali’s body is glowing red! We made a quick stop for some Aloe and then had a nice dinner and drinks at a local restaurant on the beach. Ali had crab and Kim stepped out of her box and ate a Thai dinner of beef and fried noodles.

We had planned to go out on the town and party it up tonight, but we were in so much pain from the sunburns that we just had a couple of drinks at dinner and went home and passed out. What a wonderful day in paradise!

Here are pics from Paradise!