-10 plane rides
-3 airlines
-8 boat rides
-6 taxi rides
-44(ish) total flying hours (mind you that's just flying time, not airport/traveling time)
-370 pictures
-2 lost/forgotten items (1 dress, 1 wedding ring...luckily not one of ours, not so lucky for my bro-in-law)
-4 adults, 4 kids
-24/7 intense heat/humidity (aka constant sweating)
-87 servings of white rice (give or take..just know it was a lot)
how do i sum all that up in a few blog posts? it's going to be tricky. here goes. oh, and if you want to skip all the chit-chat and go straight to the pictures, i can't say i blame you.
for record keeping purposes (for ourselves, mostly, and because it was quite a trek...malaysia's really far away, i don't know if you knew that) this is how we got to malaysia:
left SLC at 830am on thursday, arrived San Fran at 945am
left San Fran at 115pm, arrived in Tokyo at 440pm on friday
left Tokyo at 620pm, arrived in Singapore at 1220am on saturday
*layover in Singapore airport for 8 hours all night...it was pretty rough*
left Singapore at 850am, arrived in kota kinabalu, malaysia at 1120am on saturday
got that??
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| (one of the many) airplane ride |
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| in the Singapore airport around 1am - we were pretty hungry. mcdonalds? why not. |
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| weird tiny little plastic plate thingy's for the ketsup |
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| our sleeping arrangements for that 8 hour layover in Singapore. told you it was rough. |
my sister and her family got there the night before us, so we got a taxi from the airport to take us to the condo they were staying at. needlesstosay, we were pretty beat. we wandered around the market down the street a bit, but it was SO hot and humid, we were melting. we didn't last long. Jae doesn't sleep on planes very well at all, so he'd only slept about an hour or so the whole trip there. i slept maybe 4 hours. Jae passed out around 3pm saturday and i could not wake him up the rest of the night. i went to bed around 7pm and we slept til we had to get up sunday morning around 6.
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| YAY! finally made it to malaysia |
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| ocean across the street from our condo |
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| drinking the coconut juice. it was kind of warm and NOT good. |
sunday: we took a short flight to Sandakan, another city in Malaysia, where we stayed at a really nice hotel with an even nicer pool. we had a hired tour guide for this part of the trip, so that was nice. he was hired for just our family, it wasn't like a big tour group, so we had a private driver and guide for 4 days. made things so much easier! we were all over on this trip - spent every night in a different place. when we first got off the plane, we took a short tour around the city and got to walk through a small part of what we would call a neighborhood, i guess. we spent the day sunday at the pool and ate at a local restaurant for dinner. they're right on the ocean, so everything is seafood and it is super fresh. we're talking literally straight off the boats and sent to the kitchen. they let us roam in the back at all the fish, crab, lobster, etc sitting in the back in water waiting to be taken to the kitchen.
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| huge, puffy clouds looked like snow |
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| mt. kinabalu. you can actually hike this. we just ran out of time & energy |
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| this is basically the only sidewalk down the middle of houses |
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| they build their houses on these beams to keep them up away from possible storm flooding & such. kind of scary to me, but i'm sure it's all they really know, so they don't think twice about it. |
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| they like to use lots of color, it's kind of neat |
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| a goat lives on their porch! |
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| walking through a wet market - some of the super fresh fish. smells wonderful... |
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| this little dude was all floaty-ed out |
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| most of the pool area |
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| kiddie pool |
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| this was a nice spot. there was just total jungle behind us. super cool. |
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| brothers hangin out, eating some crackers after some hardcore swimming. and about two minutes later... |
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| ....Eli was like this. |
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| our first local dinner! |
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| Liam spilled some super hot egg soup on his hand during dinner. it was pretty traumatic - it actually blistered over the next few days. we wrapped it in an ice cold bandana and Hattie was forcing him to smile. |
so there you go. did you make it through all of that? eek, i barely did, and i'm the one writing it.
next part coming soon.
Can't wait to see more photos! It looked amazing!
ReplyDelete(Except for all the flying, that is...)
Oh no! One of your rings or Jae's??? Looks pretty. I would have died after all that travel time. Let's get together this week and catch up. Xo.
ReplyDeleteLOL! Jae sleeping on the chair, the YUMMY coconut water and such! love this post! by the way, I totally was in Malaysia mode by the time I got to the hot soup injury at the end of the post and misread cold bandana and instead read cold banana (imagining some islander cold banana leaf mystical remedy instead, way cooler than a cold bandana). :D
ReplyDeleteP.S. THANK YOU for not making me prove I'm not a robot. Lately those word verifications have been killin' me! (or maybe I'm just getting lazier by the minute...)
ReplyDeleteYour trip sounds exciting but exhausting! I would not have done well with all the flights...after about 2 hours I start to struggle haha!
ReplyDeleteso fun + adventersome! the traveling would have done me in, but holy crap what a once in a lifetime trip!! glad you're home safe and sound!!
ReplyDelete