Travels are over. I’m back in the UK.

The last 4 or so months since we finished teaching in China have flown by. We spent 6 weeks in Malaysia, 6 weeks in Indonesia, and 4 weeks in Koh Samui with a quick trip to Singapore for the F1 GP. We loved it all, however Bali was a bit of a pain as we found ourselves there at the height of peak season. Can’t get back to SE Asia.

During the that time I suffered health problems that resulted in a diagnosis of Hypothyroidism and a warning that it really was time to take care of my diet and health. I also missed out on the life of my nephew Adam who was born in March but sadly passed away in September.

I took the doctor’s advice and completely changed my diet, lots more fish and vegetables, very little fried food. I started regular exercise and even took part in a 5km fun run when in Koh Samui. I’ve been taking  thyroxine pills for my thyroid problem for over 3 months now and feel much better.

I’m back working at 1stContact on their php projects. The first day back was a little weird as it really felt like I hadn’t been away, stopping off at the same tube station, going into the same office. It was hard to believe it had been 2 years since I was last there.

I miss Asia, especially China and  Koh Samui as we made a lot of friends in our time there, but I seem to have fallen back into working quite easily. The one thing that I haven’t got used to is the cold, no matter how much I wear I’m always cold.

Been meeting up with friends and family the last week and this weekend we’ve got to get down to the joys of house hunting. However I will always be looking for the next opportunity to get out to Asia.

When we got back into Malaysia from Singapore the guy at imigration very nicely put his big stamp on one of the blank pages I was saving for my Indonesia visa. I’d heard that sometimes the Indonesian Embassy like you to have a number of blank pages and I now had only one left. Because of this we thought it was best to go and get our Indo Visa early incase of problems, so headed back to KL.

We got to the Embassy early the next morning and queued up to find out if I’d have problems with my passport. Sure enough they wanted more blank pages than I had and told me I’d need a new passport. So out of the Indo Embassy, into a taxi and onto the British Embassy. The British Embassy was more secure than Fort Knox and after getting through the layers of security I had in my possession a Passport application form and price for a new passport (120quid and it’ll take 2 weeks). Off I went to the nearest fast food restaurant to grab a table so I could fill out the application form.

My first worry was that I was going to be stuck in KL for two weeks, having lived in China for 8 months I was quite used to not being able to go anywhere without my passport. The next was where to find someone to counter-sign my application. You need someone you’ve known for at least 2 years who isn’t family, I meant to pack one before I left the UK but in the rush I just forgot.

Back to the Embassy with application form in hand and a week’s worth of travel money. Turned out I can travel around Malaysia without a passport, just need a photocopy of my photo page and entry stamp page just in case. As for the counter-signature it took a while to convince the girl that I didn’t know any doctors, lawyers, accountants or judges in Malaysia. Then I remembered my “Foreign Expert’s Certificate” (work permit) from China and asked if that’ll do to prove I am who I say I am. I got a maybe, handed over the forms and money and was told to come back in two weeks (two days before we fly to Borneo). She added “if the application is delayed because you don’t have a counter signature it’s not our fault”. Lovely.

No point sweating over it, tomorrow we go to Ipoh and I’ll try not to worry about the passport until we return to KL in two weeks.

We took an early bus up to Melaka. The hostel we’d picked was absolutely fantastic, they’d only been open a few months but it really was great and very reasonably priced too. It had a wonderful location backing onto the river and you could sit out and watch the boats go by.
We had a quick walk around Melaka and decided 2 nights wouldn’t be enough so extended it to 4.

Melaka is a very relaxing city with a nice slow pace of life. We did quickly explore the new part of the city down by the sea but found it lacked any real charm and the true heart of Melaka lay in the old town.

We wandered the chinese area looking at all the fantastic chinese shop houses. I tried out Chicken Rice for the first time after many trips to Malaysia and kicked myself for not having done so earlier. We went to the night market and watched the local kids put on a talent show.

We used our 4 days to explore the city slowly and really didn’t want to leave when the time came. We hope to come back here again sometime.

Made use of the “Singapore Super Sale” to get some new clothes from Marks and Spencers. Can’t go wrong with M&S and my experiences with cheap local made clothes is they really don’t last me very long.

After shopping we wandered down to the Asian Civilisations Museum. The Museum was good but we’d seen most of it before as we’d travelled through SE Asia. They did however have a good section on Islam and a special exhibition about some Chinese Dynasty.

The next day we headed to the Zoo. Unfortunately they had no Pandas which made me regret not going to Beijing Zoo during the 8 months we lived there. The rest of the zoo was pretty cool and the cutest animals were definately the otters.

We had bought a combo ticket to the daytime zoo and the night safari, so the next day after chilling most of the day we headed back to the Zoo in the evening to meet Jemma for the night safari. The night safari was really interesting as we got to see a lot of the animals that were a little more elusive during the day.

Back to the hostel to get ready for our trip on to Melaka.

Arrived from Tianjin to KL late at night and went straight to our hostel to get some kip. Jemma was staying in a different hostel, so we left her in a cab with an aussie we’d found at the bus station and arranged to meet the next day.

When we got up we headed into Imbi area to do some essential shopping and arrange bus tickets to Singapore. We opted for a fairly pricey (more than flying) luxury bus ride to Singapore, apparently each seat gets it’s own TV with video on demand, massage facility and Wifi.

We woke excited the next day to get to the bus, it turned out to be as good as advertised. I just wish it had been longer than 5 hour trip. Jemma was staying with her brother so Quynh and I checked into our hostel and then headed with Jemma to her brother’s for a nice BBQ.

The date is set. We fly back to the UK on the 10th October. It’s quite strange to think we’ll be back “home” almost two years after leaving for our 1 year travels.

Back to the rat race. I’ll need to find a 9 to 5 job, a place to live and worst of all pay the same for one pint of beer in a pub that I could live on for a day in China.

It’s still 5 months away so hopefully the worst of the recession might be over by then. I’ve been keeping myself busy and in practice with freelance PHP work, so it shouldn’t be too bad trying to find a job.

Once the job is found I’m looking forward to some house hunting. Its clearly time we settled down and started a family, so we’ll be looking for a nice house with a garden somewhere green, but still within easy commute of London.

Other things I’m looking forward to are getting back to my Xbox 360 (sad I know) and using a nice powerful desktop PC with a decent size display. I love my Thinkpad x61s to bits, but web development can be a bit of a pain sometimes on a 12″ display.

I will sorely miss Asia. Luckily we’ve got 4 months of traveling planned between when we finish teaching in June and when we head off in October. The final month of which will see us staying in Koh Samui doing absolutely nothing but relaxing.

It’s been a great adventure, but it had to end sometime. We only planned to be away for 12 months and will have ended up being away for 22, so can’t really complain.

Here’s to the next 5 months.

After our taste of KL from up high we set off for a lunch at the KL Tower, this is KL’s tall telecoms tower. It is placed on the top of a hill giving you a great view of the city from the top. The restaurant itself is a revolving restaurant so you can enjoy your meal as the city moves by.

After lunch we rested our bellies for the afternoon and then set out in the evening to get some nice night shots down at Merdeka Square.

The next day we headed off to the Batu caves, just outside KL. The main cave is located at the top of a couple of hundred steps but it’s well worth the climb. On the way you get harassed by monkeys looking for a free lunch. At the top is a large cave with some interesting light effects. It was nice to get to the top as I’d originally been here with my ex-boss Ian “Bullshitter” Ruff (currently wanted on a few thousand charges of fraud) who told me that the best cave was at the bottom and there was no point walking up. This, it would seem, turned out to be bullshit.

After we got back down we had a lazy afternoon and prepared to head to Penang the next day.

P.S. sorry for the delay in posting this. I’m kinda lazy.

We hit Kuala Lumpur at 9am after our late night flight from Hangzhou and went straight to bed. After a good snooze we got up in the afternoon to go and explore.

This is actually my fifth time in KL, but my previous trips have been on business and I never had a chance to really see the place. I’d seen a number of sights but was always ferried around by a driver so had no idea of the exact layout of the city.

The first afternoon we just ventured out around our hostel (Seria Inn) which is located between Little India and Chinatown. We checked out Petaling Street, the Central Market (where I bought another bracelet) and wandered around some of the colonial architecture at Merdeka Square. After our walk we headed back to the hostel for a rest and then headed out for a local curry in the evening.

The second day we got up early and headed off to the Twin Towers at KLCC, so that we could stand in line to get tickets up to the Skybridge half way up the towers. The queue wasn’t as big as expected, and by 9:45 we were 41 stories up looking out over the city. The view was pretty good, but in my opinion not as good as the view from the restaurant at the top of the KL Tower, so we decided we’d go there for lunch another day.

After the trip up the towers we headed off to Times Square shopping mall. This mall is so large that it has a theme park inside with it’s own roller coaster that zooms over head as you move from shop to shop. We found a restaurant doing Thai BBQ and settled in for a meat feast. Once we’d eaten half a cow we slowly walked around the rest of the shops.

We’d been recommended by some friends a special kind of spa which was located in another shopping mall. We were about to head there when we spotted the same thing in the Times Square Mall. It’s basically a foot spa with a difference. Rather than having a pretty young thing hacking the dead skin off your feet, the job is left to hundreds of fish. Yes, that’s right, fish.

At first it tickled a lot, but after a while it just felt a bit weird. We sat there for 30 minutes whilst the fish lunched on us. Once our time was up our feet felt pretty good, though I reckon I need another 30 minutes.

The rest of the day was just wandering around shops then heading home for food and an early night.

When I was in Hangzhou, I went for a nice massage (not the happy ending kind).

After the massage there was an awkward moment where she started pointing to her mouth and making dodgy noises. I couldn’t understand what she was saying in Mandarin, but then she tried Cantonese and I got it. She was asking if I wanted anything to eat.

I turned down her kind offer and she then offered me cupping. The price seemed reasonable, and I’d heard about it before so I thought why not give it a shot.

Here is the result:

I can safely say I WONT be doing that again.  I thought it was a bit painful when she put them on and it started sucking my skin up into the cup. The process of removing them was something completely different. Only thing I could liken it to is having a plaster the size of your palm ripped off, repeatedly.

If, however, you enjoy pain and are happy to pay a reasonable price to receive it then I believe this is perfect for you.

We flew to Hangzhou within hours of finishing our exam marking and handing in our final grades for our classes. We’d have liked to get train tickets, but with 200 million Chinese people using the trains to get home for Spring Festival they were sold out well in advance.

We arrived at the West Lake Youth Hostel on the South East corner of the famous West Lake. It was 1am, but we were happy to see Frank waiting at the reception to greet us. He was smiling as ever and his english had clearly improved a lot since the last time we saw him in March.

The scenery in Hangzhou was as pretty as ever, but there were about 5 times as many tourists as we’d ever seen. I think this was because the weather was quite mild for winter. The last time we were there in January there was a foot of snow on everything, this time I hardly wore my jacket.

One of the less plesent changes was the onward march of Chinese Development which meant for the first time in 4 visits the lake area had smog from the nearby city. There was a noticable increase in traffic as well.

Without trying to sound too much like an aging hippy reminiscing about how good Thailand was before it was “discovered”, I have to say Hangzhou was better before the massive increase in development and is a lot more relaxed with less tourists around.

Quynh was ill with a stomach bug for a few days, so I spent a lot of time showing Bill (our American teaching colleague and co-traveller) around the sights. I did some shopping too and managed to find clothes that fit me which is quite a task in China.

We enjoyed staying in the West Lake Hostel again, it remains one of our favourite places we’ve stayed in. If anyone is heading that way make sure you look it up.

Now off to Kuala Lumpur for some hot weather.