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We escaped the African continent
having blown through our budget plan, lost ten pounds, and
managed to escape life threatening illness, but running out
of time before meeting with the Nigerians in exhile who solicited
our help via email in getting unclaimed funds out of their
country. Our flight from Johannesburg was delayed for a day
due to heavy snows in Paris grounding several AirMauritius
planes. So the gracious airline sheltered us from the sweltering
African summer sun in the Airport Holiday Inn for the night
and paid for our meals only to extricate us from our unexpected
luxury suite to tell us that another aircraft had been chartered
and would be departing at 1:35 AM.
Read more about our African
Kumuka Tour....
We made a five day stop-over in Mauritius
half way on our journey across the Indian Ocean to the Malay
peninsula. An island 500 miles East of Madagascar, Mauritius
is situated about as far away from home on this big blue planet
as one can get and still be on dry land, 11,234 miles. The
island whose claim to fame as the last home of the Dodo birds
before their extinction in the 1680's reminded us of Kauai
and we enjoyed relaxing in the malaria free tropical heat
cooled by the afternoon trade winds.
Read
more about Mauritius....
Leaving the French tourists at the Mauritius
airport bound for home proudly wearing their January sunburns
like medals of honor we headed in the other direction, skirting
the equator to Malaysia to begin our SouthEast Asia odessey
in search of monkeys.
We've given up on shoes and Teva's and now
live in our flip-flops. We've abandonded our identities as
poster children for Western travel gear, opting for simple
inexpensive cotton clothing.
Wandering around with plastic bags filled with the contents
of our utility belts we leave the daypacks for the other tourists.
We are learning to blend in. We have evolved.
Two days after arriving in Kuala Lumpur,
Lisa smiles at her foresight for dying her hair darker to
blend into the crowds in Asia. It is working. Only half of
the men on the train stare at her. That same day she enjoyed
her first experience with an asian toilet. She survived but
our paper map of the city didn't fare so well.
Although we fell in love with the non-stop
energy of Kuala Lumpur, somewhere between the Bruce Lee Battle
Zone Internet Cafe and the fish head soup we decide we'd had
enough of the big city and began our trek northward toward
Northern Thailand. Our only advance planning being our airline
tickets returning us to Bangkok from Laos on February 18th
to arrange for our Visas into Cambodia and Vietnam.
We'll be travelling by train and bus, slowly
making the trek North along the Malay peninsula sampling the
snorkeling, flirting with fish, searching for monkeys, gorging
our bellies on Thai and Malay cuisine and searching for the
perfect opportunity to peel off thebeaten tourist track and
sample the culture along the way.
We're happy to be in South East Asia where
we can get back on track with our budget as Africa turned
out to be more expensive than we had hoped or planned. Christmas
holiday anywhere where the weather is good tends to get quite
pricey. Meeting our Nigerian friend in exhile to help him
transfer those funds might have helped pay the expenses but
that's another story.
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