Not Thailand

So here is the story of my Not Thailand Adventures. I'm back home now and had a few adventures since getting home including a roadtrip to Cork! I finally made it to the far end of the island. More on that later. Maybe.

Anyway, on that first Monday, instead of being at the airport at the butt crack of dawn (4.00am. Actually this is a comfortable three hours before dawn in Singapore) I was lying peacefully in my bed sound asleep. But soon enough I was up. I had things to do.

I decided that I needed to be a tourist for my 10 days before I went home. I knew I couldn’t change my home flights so short of lying on the sofa and watching Ellen and Oprah, fun and all as it sounds just wasn’t going to cut it. Off I set to see if I could book tickets to Kuala Lumpur and Bali and as I you know I was successful. But there was still tourist things to be done in Singapore.

East Coast Park
This is a large stretch of reclaimed land in the, yes you guessed it, East of Singapore. You can hire bikes and rollerblades there and so off I set. I thought it best to stick to the bike given my tendency to fall in shoes, imagine the carnage if those shoes had wheels.


This is 'Rainbow Astroid' (named in a similar vein to the bikes at Camp – 'Red Thunder', 'Purple Rain' and 'White Lightning')

I had so much fun the entire afternoon, I cycled the entire length (and back again) which I think is about 10km (not 100 miles a day I know). Fun but sore butt and sweaty beast on the sweat levels.

KL
I got up early on Tuesday morning to get downtown to get the bus to KL. There was pretty much only one thing I wanted to see in KL (and that’s mostly because we have ‘Entrapment’ on video), the Petronas Towers. But World Traveller that I am, I have the Rough Guide to South East Asia and it was able to point me the direction of a few other things of note.

On Tuesday afternoon I braved a KL buses and rode out to Batu Caves to a massive Hindu Temple there. It might be in the same class as the Giant’s Causeway, worth seeing but not worth going to see. But the big gold statue was impressive all the same.


On Wednesday I went to the ‘Skybridge’ which was so well worth it. It takes up two floors. Well I suppose to they need two, one for people who work there to actually cross towers without going all the way to the bottom and one for the tourists like me.


In the afternoon, not content with my 40 floor height I went to KL Tower to see the view from the top. NB It's not actually like Pisa but perpendicular to the ground. I was probably walking at the same time as taking this like the tourist I was.

Bali
Friday saw the adventure begin to Bali. I won’t lie to you, I was slightly nervous about going. I had researched it too much and read too many things about dodgy food and water, unsafe airplanes, terrorist attacks and thieving pickpockets. So I took precautions:
- Bottled water
- No spicy food, well cooked meat
- ‘Wedding’ ring on my finger
- All extra cards removed from purse and camera, mobile etc left behind when I went out.

But hurray, all was safe and I wasn’t sick, didn’t get mugged, planes landed ok and terrorists left Bali alone while I was there.


My hotel was about 400m from the memorial from the bomb in 2002.

Most of the time was spent either on the beach or at the pool which was relaxing and probably something I haven’t done on a holiday since the glorious days of Majorca in the early nineties.


About three seconds after I took this that wave wiped it!

The highlight of the whole trip though was Sunday. I had researched enough to find out there was an Elephant Safari Park so I thought that would be fun. Then I found a company that runs a bike rides in the morning and elephant safari in the afternoon. Steve Irwin even said this Elephant Park was good and David Beckham has been there. How could you not go?!

We cycled down from a volcano (active apparently) to the Safari Park, a distance of 26km (but the key word there is down) through rice paddies, past temples and children ever keen to practice their English with shouts of ‘Hello! Hello! Hello!


Our guides were really good at stopping and showing us thing. This is rice harvesting, but we also saw coffee roasting, coffee beans, chilis and other things I can't remember.


I think my face says it all.

Anyway as you can imagine I took rather a lot of photos so thought I would try to use my new video editing skills and show you them this way as it takes ages to upload otherwise and you might get bored but in a video you might watch it and think it interesting. Although it is a bit like a slideshow. But there is music. Oooh.



Quite proud of my first 'video'. There are no moving images because Quicktime and Movie Maker don't get on. Oh and this will probably be my first and last 'video' as they take too darn long!