Total distance travelled today: 19.1 km (by car) Elapsed time of travel: 2 hours, 16 minutes Lodging for the Night: Hotel Boulevard After a sleepless first overnight flight to Amsterdam (6 hours 15 min), 6 hours out in Amsterdam with our Dutch friends, Annelie and Sander, and another relatively sleepless overnight flight (8 hours...and 2 days later), we arrived exhausted in Nairobi at 6am. The lineup for the visas seemed to take forever, but there were no hassles and soon we were off to the hotel (we managed to pay less for a transit visa because we were going to be in Kenya for less than 24 hours). We were very happy that we had gotten a transfer to the hotel from gadventures, because we were just so tired and it was just so easy. The ... read more

This was our last morning staying in Koh Phi phi so we wanted to make the most of our accommodation by having a swim the moment we woke up. It's so convenient having the direct entry into the pool! Because we were going to spend the night on a boat (called the maya bay sleep aboard- see later), it took some coordination to pack because we just wanted our little bags. After we checked out, we only had a few hours so we decided to go for a walk to the tsunami village, which we couldn't find and we didn't really know what we would find there anyways. Then we found a nice Thai place for lunch right on the beach (actually right across from) overlooking the beach where the water taxis and ferries go in ... read more

Although we really enjoyed our time in Malaysia, we were happy to be leaving KL to go to Thailand. KL is a nice city but now we're starting to think that e pollution in KL is the cause of Elysia's really bad conjunctivitis that she's had since we first got to KL (although to be honest, unless the haze was passing through, it didn't seem bad at all). It seems like it flares up each time we set foot outside in KL and goes away when we're gone. So for now we say that Elysia is allergic to KL and we're happy to move on! In fact, today we left just as it seems that the haze was coming back through. The air was very smoky, it was hot and muggy, and the visibility was poor. ... read more

There are days when travelling that it seems that everything goes wrong. This is one of those days. Actually, it started last night after we left Brunei. We left for the Brunei airport at 2pm. The flight is only 2 hours and 20 minutes long and it left at 4pm, but we didn't get into our hotel room in Kuala Lumpur until 10:15pm. Seem like a long transit time? Yeah, it was. It started with Elysia's genius idea to take the train instead of the bus from the Low Cost Carriers terminal (where Air Asia flys into) to the Kuala Lumpur city centre. Both supposedly take about the same time (they claim the train is 10 minutes shorter- just under an hour), but the train is double the price (train=25 ringgits for 2, or 4 bucks ... read more

We left the hotel early this morning and headed for the docks. We had a spot on a 7:30 am water taxi to Bangar (another city in Brunei) with our name on it. From there we would take a car to the edge of Ulu Temburong National Park and finally a motorized canoe (or longboat) up river, deep into the park. It was all quite the adventure, and very fun! The initial water taxi ride was in a fairly large power boat, and there were about 16 people onboard. When you leave Bandar, you pass by the fishing village and then speed through some very small waterways in the Mangrove forests. At times it seems like there was only about 10 feet between each side of the boat and the trees, and we were cruising along ... read more