Technology

It is interesting how far technology has come over the many years we have been traveling. We get frustrated when the wifi doesn't work or our connection gets lost while in the comfort of our hotel rooms now, but it was not so long ago that we would have to search out an Internet cafe in some foreign city to try to communicate with those at home. I have been frustrated by many a strange keyboard that took twice as long as usual to use because none of the letters corresponded. Or spending money to write e mails that would vanish into thin air.

When we were in South America 38 years ago, we would feel grateful to receive the occasional letter, and we seldom phoned home because it was just too difficult or expensive. I remember calling home from Thailand years ago. We ended up spending $40 on a phone call with our kids to hear that they hated the babysitter we put in charge of them! 

Now we are able to call relatives in Europe and it sounds like they are across town.

The internet allows us to make reservations online for buses ,planes , trains and hotels at a moments notice. 

We have also been amused by how connected everyone is to their phones here. And the selfies, oh my! Ten days ago Jim and I barely even knew what selfie sticks were, and now we're kinda thinking of buying one( not really). Kids and adults everywhere here use them constantly. We saw one young Woman wearing a shirt that said " stop taking selfies". I have to agree. 

That being said, though, I love my phone for taking photos and connecting to wifi when possible. It is a wonderful way to stay connected with home, and while some people prefer not to be connected, I find it comforting when I am half a world away. My sister in France and I can email and it's like we are in the same time zone. We don't use our phones for calling as that is still prohibitively expensive, but I imagine that in the not too distant future that will change too. And yes, I know about SIM cards! We did buy a cheap flip phone that we bought a SIM card for and it is nice to know we can call home if necessary. Ah, the wonders of technology!

Hotels

After 10 days on the road, I am already feeling the need to settle down in one spot for a while, to have a bit less of a wayfarer mentality. When we traveled in South America for 7 months, we were pretty much on the go the whole time except for when we stayed a week here or there. We agreed that on this trip we would find someplace nice and stay awhile. Last night over a dinner of chili crab, butter prawns and satay in Kuala Lumpur, Jim jokingly said, " let's just stay here until May". Tempting, and we think we could work our way through the menu in just about that amount of time! They make it very easy and attractive to emigrate to Malaysia, we hear. That could be Jim's 4 th retirement.

But wait , I was talking about hotels...we have stayed in a wide range of places on our trip so far and as I write this, we are in a "splurge" hotel with a suite and kitchen facilities that is a bit like an upscale Embassy Suites. Price around 65$ with breakfast, location, near Embassy row. 

View from our window.

And yes, I think I have figured out how to post photos! 

We have stayed in a guesthouse for $15 a night( don't recommend it) and a lovely old guesthouse for about 30$. In Malaysia, you can get a decent hotel for $20 that is clean and basic. In Singapore, a much larger, more expensive city, we stayed in what we call the " hotel of the future" which was newly renovated , small but immaculately clean and modern for around $60. Granted, it was in the middle if the red light district, but the ladies never bothered jim when he was out with me! If they built that kind of hotel in the States, they would be fully booked, especially in major cities.

On a trip of this length, we obviously need to keep costs down so $30 should be about our limit while we are SE Asia. Generally speaking,we no longer want to stay in backpacker hotels, which are at the very budget end of the scale, but who knows, we might try it! 

Photos and boat trips

I have taken lots of photos, but have had no success in posting them to the blog. Each time I try to do that, the screen freezes and all is lost. So I will continue to try and see if I have success. If you are bored by all this dull writing, I am sorry. No need to be a follower.

Cynthia's travel rule # 2. Always take the boat trip 

We have followed this rule for many years of travel and have never been sorry. We have punted on the Thames, taken a cruise along the Bosphorus in Istanbul and small boat trips too numerous to remember. Ferries are often a cheap way to get around a city and provide lots of entertainment. We even did the ultimate boat trip ( for us) last spring when we rented a canal boat in England with friends and lazily cruised the canals for a week. One of our best, and  most relaxing vacations ever!

So when there is a possibility for a boat ride when we travel, we try to take advantage of it, as you get a unique perspective that you might not see another way. 

We just took a ride on a bum boat in the Singapore river, an amazing, bustling place. We hope to take a night boat ride soon to see fireflies. We'll keep you posted. So if you have a chance, take a boat ride! 

Back to the beginning

I said that I would write more about how this trip came about. It was originally Jim's idea to take a long trip, and I reluctantly agreed, knowing that it was a big commitment to try to get our house in shape to rent. Plus, we still had two boys living at home, so we gave them plenty of warning that we intended to vacate. Not that they weren't ready to go! Well, maybe one of them was ready.
Our son Matt spent a good part of the previous winter cleaning out the basement- a Herculean task in itself.  Then we began to mess it up again. I insisted that I was NOT a hoarder! but was beginning to have my doubts.
Then it came down to the wire when we really had to get serious about cleaning out our personal belongings. After living in our home for 35 years, there is a lot of stuff! We hauled out mountains of garbage, gave away lots of clothes and miscellaneous items to charities and began the task of packing up our clothes. Just writing about it now brings back the feelings of stress during that process. Short of moving, we would never have done this work, and it was a good exercise for all of us, in spite of how hard it was. And it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

By this time, the trip had taken shape - at least we knew that we planned to be gone around 4 months- one month for every decade we've been married - that was my idea. Jim started to let his work contacts know he would be away.
We still had not advertised the house for rent. I guess some part of me really didn't want to do that, so we put it off until a month before we left. We advertised in several places and got a total of two interested parties! One young couple needed a longer rental period. The other young couple had sold a house and needed temporary housing until they moved to the Midwest in June. The deal was settled, much to our amazement! They had three kids under 4 and a big dog. Wow, our house hadn't seen that kind of action in years.
A week before we were to leave the house in their hands, they wrote to say they got a job in a Detroit, and would only plan to stay for one month. Geeze. It had seemed so perfect. Nothing we could do at that point but move forward.,
We managed to finish cleaning with one hour to spare before handing over the keys, and stayed with friends for two nights before our flight.
I realized I had forgotten a few things at the house, so went back the next day to a house suddenly filled with kids toys and a big dog who barked at me when I timidly entered my front door. Time to go.

Malacca

I drew up a list of rules for travel during our last trip and one of my rules is:
It takes three days to know a place- and sometimes you don't have three days.
So, this trip we decided that one of the things we would try to do was spend at least three days in a new place ( unless it was not a place we wanted to stay that long).
After three nights in Kuala Lumpur, we made a reservation for a hotel in Malacca online and took a cab to the bus station, nearly20 minutes away. Once our cab drove off, I realized I had left my small carry on bag in the cab! Yikes! I went inside and asked at information if they could make a call, and they sent me to customer service,who did call the hotel, who tracked down the cab driver and 15 minutes later she arrived with my bag! Now this is a country to like. The bus stations are like airports, with very deluxe buses. And easy to navigate.
We had a 2 hour ride and got a taxi to our hotel, but once there they couldn't find our reservation. I showed her the confirmation on my phone, and she said, no, that is the guest house around the corner. Luckily it was a short walk, but did not look promising. Jim found the owner and he led us to a small rectangle of a room barely big enough for a bed. Uh, this was not what I was expecting.
These challenges at the beginning of our trip truly felt like tests and I wasn't sure I was up to them. But this is travel- the good and the bad.
We enjoyed our first day and found Malacca to be quite charming. It is a unesco world heritage site, so that is to be expected. It is small and approachable, with a river through the heart of it.
The Malacca river cruise gave us a good feel for the city, and I spotted some alternative hotels to check out as I was pretty determined to move out of our windowless room.
Jim also did some recon work and we chose Heeron House right on the river. It was a good choice,and after two nights there I hated to leave. We felt like members of their family and they called us by name when we came and went. It was a lovely old guesthouse and the view of the river was restful. We would not have discovered it, or met the fun Canadian couple who were also staying there had we not had the unfortunate booking mix up.

Fun in Malaysia

I'm going to do another post while I still have a chance because I never know when my wifi connection will be lost. The sights and sounds of KL were very interesting for us, even though we have traveled to other parts of SE Asia. This is a unique culture because it is composed of Muslims , Hindus, Buddhists and a Christian minority. They all seem to intermingle harmoniously, so you will find Chinatown, Little India and mosques in many larger cities, with all the cultures living and working side by side. Then there was the call to prayer that woke us at 5 am. I had forgotten what a haunting and mystical sound this is, and I welcomed it. I did not enjoy my visit to the mosque as much, though, since it was mandatory for me to wear a red hooded robe that was hot and sweaty and not at all attractive!
In Little India we arrived at a temple just as a wedding was about to take place. I have always wanted to be a witness to a Hindu wedding and was not disappointed! All around the temple were vendors of flower garlands, the likes of which I have never seen, not even in India. Some were 5' long, made of red white and yellow mums.
Oh, the sights and sounds! After this day all of my travel fatigue kind of went away, if only for a while. This is why we get on planes and fly for 30 hours- to see what wonders are half a world away.

Out of the woods

Well, as it turns out, it isn't so easy to do a blog post in Malaysia...at least not in the places with sketchy wifi connections like we've been staying at. So' we'll do our best to catch up on the days since our arrival. It took us a while to settle in after the 30 hours and six flights.in fact, I would go so far as to say I was a bit ready to throw in the towel and come home- but I knew that I didn't really want to come home, either. I chalk it up to "travel fatigue", which can strike at any time.
Kuala Lumpur is a big, bustling city, and big cities require more time, money and energy than we realize.
That being said, though, we did finally find a groove and started to enjoy it. Shopping is big there, and they seem to have at least one of almost any brand name store you can imagine. I had fun browsing the art section of Kinokuniya in the mall under the Petronas towers.  I also found a Muji across the street, while Jim watched a lively Chinese dance performance. We are NOT shoppers, but it was entertaining to watch the bustle around us, and we finally stopped for a big mug of tea at I heart San Francisco.
Our favorite place in
Kuala Lumpur had to be Bukit Bintang seafood street where restaurants set out tables along the street and you could stroll the street and choose a good spot. We lucked out the first night and had a fabulous meal of satay and noodles with prawns at a crowded place. So good that we went back the next night, as we are won't to do. I'm going to attempt to post this before the wifi goes away again...

Some words about the blog title

You may wonder why this name for our blog? Well, it was Jim's idea- a riff on our favorite reality show, The Amazing Race, which we have enjoyed watching from its original episodes. Some of you may know that Jim liked it so much that he sent in an audition tape several years ago of himself as a buttoned down fire chief with a stilt walking son as his partner. Unfortunately they didn't get a call back. Go figure!
 We've enjoyed being armchair travelers over the years, and sometimes on real trips when things so wrong, we say " at least we're not on the amazing race" and sometimes it feels as if we are. Especially these last 24 hours. I won't say it hasn't been a slog, as it has, and sometimes travel is grueling , but once we sat in our luxurious lavender  " pod" on Thai Air Royal Silk business class, the cares of the world sort of melted away for a bit. You know it has been a good trip when you kind of hate to leave the airplane! I don't know if I have ever felt that way before.
So now we wait to reboard our Thai Air flight after disembarking in Seoul, going through security once again with all of our belongings, and having to dig through my bag to produce a pair of kiddy scissors which they carefully measured and pronounced OK!
Soon, very soon, I hope to figure out how to post a photo to this blog...

Travel is hard- travel is an adventure

Maybe I should back up and give a little bit of history about the reason behind this trip that my friend Paula described as "Around the World in 200 Days".
A couple of years ago Jim, my better half, proposed an idea to take an extended trip of several months and rent out our house during that time.
I'll admit that I was somewhat reluctant- not so much about the travel part as much as the renting out ( and cleaning out) the house. I'm not sure if he thought that it would be a good excuse to weed out a lot of stuff, and children, or  that he liked the idea of defraying some of the cost of the trip with some rental income. To me, it seemed like a HUGE JOB. But I wrote the idea down in my journal and gave it some thought. I knew that if it was important to him that I should seriously entertain the concept.
Time passed and we mulled over possible itineraries. We were much too ambitious, as is so often the case, but eventually narrowed it down to include parts of Southeast Asia that we had not been to before, eventually wending our way back to Europe where we hoped to meet our son and daughter in law in Croatia. Originally we imagined that we would invite all of our sons to join us at some point in our travels, but they all had different travel plans.
In the next installment, I will tell a bit more about how our plans took shape.

Thoughts on travel

Day one of the amazing ( not a) race:
We arrived at PDX airport at 8 am for our 9:30 flight to San Francisco, and onward to Taipei. There were some "issues" with our flight, namely that they expected a delay in departure. Given the fact that we had only an hour between our planned arrival in SFO and our departure to Taipei, this was worrying. The gate agent suggested a possible alternative which involved flying SFO to LAX then on to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. This was NOT ideal!
We waited as long as we could at the gate before finally giving in and rebooking our tickets as the flight was now an hour late, so it became evident that we would arrive at about the time we were supposed to be boarding our flight to Taipei.
Hope springs eternal , though, so in true amazing race fashion, we decided to walk all the way to the international terminal just on the off chance that the flight hadn't left. It had. So we hauled ourselves back to the domestic terminal for our LAX flight, which was also late.
We were still dragging all the luggage that we had intended to check.
We arrived in LA and took the shuttle to the international terminal. Since we had tickets in business class, we were able to avail ourselves of the Star Alliance lounge. However Jim couldn't get his liquids ( mosquito repellent )  through security, so he was stuck on the ther side trying to check his bag. Since our flight to Bangkok doesn't leave until midnight, there was no way to check a bag until much later. I couldn't bear the thought of hanging out in the lounge drinking wine while he waited in limbo, so I devised a plan. It involved buying empty travel size bottles into which we decanted our mosquito spray. This time he sailed through security, no problem! High five!
So now we wait to try to arrange two seats together in business class on Thai air, in true amazing race fashion. Wish us luck.
And I leave you with this quote that I read in the lounge as I wrote this:
"Live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry."