Asia Trip - Final Post - Yogyakarta, Singapore, Cambodia, Hong Kong

A year ago today, Jerome and I left on our big Asia Adventure, and I've been thinking about all the crazy things we did and that happened recently, and I realized that I had never completed the last few posts. So I'm going to write up an abbreviated account of our last few weeks to complete the record, and for you to enjoy hopefully. 

Album of photos from this section of our trip 

Borobudur, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

 Our last post left us in Bali, being trapped by the volcano ash cloud for several extra days. This meant our stay in Yogyakarta on the island of Java was cut from four days to only one! Luckily, this was just enough time to take short visits to the two temples we wanted to see there. Borobudur and Prambanan. Both are Unesco World Heritage Sites. Borobudur is a 9th Century Buddhist temple. It had very interesting bell shaped formations on the roof that each held a Buddha.

Prambanan, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

 Prambanan is a 9th Century Hindu temple. It has a very different construction, shape and layout. It was really interesting getting to see the two temples, made during the same time period, but be so vastly different.

Javanese Wayang Shadow Puppet Show

We had just enough energy that night to go to a traditional Javanese Shadow Puppet Show, called Wayang. This art form is also designated by Unesco as an important cultural heritage. The puppets are hand cut from raw-hide, and intricately painted. The show was a traditional story, with a single puppeteer and a group of Gamelan musicians accompanying him on traditional percussion instruments. The show was very interesting, there were chairs on both sides of the screen, and you were free to move between the side where you see the shadows, and the side where you can see the puppeteer and musicians at work.   

View of the famous Singapore Harbour

After our crazy full day in Yogyakarta, we headed to Singapore. We cut our time here a bit short in order to do our Maldives Liveaboard, but still had plenty of time to explore and eat all the food on our list! 

 

I won't bore you with all the food pictures and items we ate, just a few. We started by heading to the famous Maxwell Food Centre which is a well known "Hawker" Centre where there are over 50 food stalls each specializing in different and amazing food for pretty cheap. We at the famous duck rice, which was amazing, and several other tasty dishes. Even sharing we got too full to try all the items we wanted to! 

Another food highlight was the Pepper and chili Crab we had at Momma Kongs. Which boasts having "The island's best chili crab!" It was delicious!!  

Most of our time in Singapore was spent walking around the city, and stopping here and there to eat. We also bought a new camera to replace the one that Jerome drowned in the ocean. We went to all the different areas like Bugis Street which is a giant store, the electronics mall area, and the neighbourhood where Jerome's Grandparents lived and he remembered visiting when he was small. One afternoon for a break we stopped by an interesting tea shop and had traditional Chinese afternoon tea. It turns out the Queen has had tea there, so we felt in good company! 

Between Singapore and Cambodia is when we went on the Maldives Liveaboard, which you can read about here.

Cheoung Ek, (Killing Fields Memorial) Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Our next stop was a few days in Phnom Penh. We don't have a ton of photos as most of our time was spent visiting and learning about the sites of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, where it didn't seem right to take photos. It was very sad and disturbing, but worth learning about, since neither of us had heard or knew a lot about what went on in Cambodia during that time before. 

Red Tree Ants with Beef and Basil

We went to a traditional Cambodia restaurant called Romdang which helps street youth learn to cook and be servers to get off the streets. They have lots of traditional fare there. We were a bit adventurous and tried the Red Tree Ants with Beef and Basil. If you look closely, you can see a few in the photo. You mostly didn't notice - unless you got the big winged ones, and they had an interesting sour flavour to them. We weren't brave enough to try the deep fried tarantulas like the people at the table next to us though! 

From Phnom Penh we headed south to the coast to Sihanoukville. There we spent a night on a Liveaboard and did about 5 dives. The boat was quite basic after our Maldives experience, but fun except for the big rainstorm during the night! The water was a lot less clear here than the other places we dove, but there was some really neat colourful coral that we'd never seen before and lots of neat fish, like this beautiful and bizarre cuttlefish who hung out with us for a while.

 We were also supposed to go stay on a remote island nearby for a few nights, but a giant rain storm moved in, and after our last remote island experience with the cockroaches, we decided to stay dry and bug free, so we extended our stay in town, and just relaxed and read and watched movies for a few days. We tried to do another dive, but the boats weren't even going out, so we knew we'd made the right call by not heading to the island.

Bayon Temple, Siem Reap

From Sihanoukville we flew to Siem Reap, which was an adventure with the rain causing delays, us being diverted back to Phnom Penh, and eventually getting there 6 hours later (it should've only been an hour!). We had a week booked in Siem Reap to visit the city and all the temples. We alternated days of visiting the temples and relaxing at the hotel and in the pool. It was insanely hot and humid, and walking around the temples wore us out pretty quickly in the heat. Plus we found if we tried to do too many in one day, they blurred together. 

Jerome's that little green person in the doorway!

It was quite interesting seeing all the different styles of temples and learning what they were all built and used for. Quite amazing thinking about how long ago they were all built! 

It was also interesting imagining what they all must have been like at their peak glory full of people. 

This was Ta Phrom - now known as the Tomb Raider temple from the scenes in the movie. They've fenced off all the areas that were shown as everyone wants to take their pictures there. It was a pretty cool temple in general with the giant trees growing right through the walls and roof. 

One afternoon for a break we went to play mini golf. It was a lot of fun. I got 3 holes in one! And won a beer for each! Jerome got the lowest score total, but I think we all know who really won! 

We left Cambodia and headed to Hong Kong for a day before our flight home. We explored the beautiful waterfront at night, went to the top of Victoria Peak and admired the amazing views, went to a mall in the shape of a boat, had Michelin Star Dim sum, walked through the goldfish market where we saw a fish bite holes in it's plastic bag, and a turtle escape it's bucket and make a run down the sidewalk!  

On our last day, we packed everything up and went for some Szechuan food for lunch. We bought some treats to bring back for our friends and then headed to this tea shop Jerome had found. We spent a few hours trying and learning about various teas. Had a quick dinner, and headed to the airport for our long flight home. Overall it was a truly amazing adventure, which I'm so grateful we were lucky enough to get the chance to do. There were some ups and downs, but it was truly memorable, and I think of the things we did often. Jerome and I both agreed that we enjoyed this trip a bit more than our Europe trip. Mostly because of the greater variety of activities we did, instead of mainly just visiting cities and site-seeing. I mean we climbed a mountain, explored the jungle, did over 60 dives, were stranded on a deserted island, trekked through rice fields, and of course ate lots of great food! It'll likely be quite a while before we do any more big travels, but are so glad we did these ones! Thanks for coming along for the ride with us!

Album of photos from this section of our trip 

Beautiful Bali

View of Mount Kinabalu in the distance from our dive boat in Kota Kinabalu

(This is a post that Laura wrote up after we visited Bali, but we didn't end up posting it because I went snorkeling with our non-waterproof-camera in my pocket.  After several tries, I was luckily able to recover all of our pictures!)

Album of all bali photos

Laura -- After leaving the jungle, we headed back to Kota Kinabalu for 3 fun days of diving. We'll post more about the diving once we get home and can easily see the videos and photos.

We caught a flight from there to Bali, Indonesia and headed straight to Ubud for about five days. The first place we stayed was right beside the Monkey Forest. So naturally, we spent an afternoon there. The monkeys seemed to particularly enjoy climbing on Jerome. There were all sizes and personalities and we spent several hours watching them.  Here's a couple of them:

More monkey videos in my YouTube playlist.

The next day we took a cooking class at Paon Bali. It began with a market visit where we learned about and tasted the different fruits from the area, such as mangosteens (our favorite) and salak. Then we were put to work - slicing, dicing, and grinding ingredients. Puspa the head chef led us in cooking nine traditional dishes! If you're curious, here's an online copy of the recipes. At the end we got to eat our spoils, and it was a very tasty feast!

Market selling the ingredients to prepare the traditional balinese offerings that are put out every day.

Mangosteens - our delicious!  Our favorite 'exotic' fruit.

Salak (aka snake fruit).  Kind of dry and apple-y

Laura, crushing the ingredients to make the basic yellow sauce

Jerome, crushing peanuts to make peanut sauce

Our finished meal

The following day we continued expanding our knowledge, by taking a Batik making class. We arrived at 10am, and didn't finish until 6! We started off by drawing our design on paper. Coming up with the ideas of what to draw was quite a challenge itself. Once we were happy, we transferred it onto an 18" by 36" piece of cotton, also in pencil. Then came the tricky part. You use a special little device that holds wax and lets you draw on the fabric. There's quite a knack to it. If you have too much wax or tip it up too much it leaves a big drip on your picture . If you have too little, it won't write. And if you tip it down too much, it drips boiling wax on your hand! Needless to saw we each had a few drips, but overall did pretty well. Next we used metal stamps in hot wax to make geometric patterns along the border. Once the whole piece was outlined in wax, it was time to paint in the dye. It is a bit like a colouring book picture, except where the wax is now will be left white at the end.

Tracing the outline with wax

Laura adding a border to her batik

Laura's batik - Finished with the wax and ready to color

Jerome's batik - finished with the wax and ready to color

Choosing colours was interesting. There were about 15 colours to choose from, but they didn't all paint on with the colour they'd be in the end. So the pictures looked weird. For example the green dye paints on a dark purple, and then in the chemical setting process turns green. And the reds painted on very faint, but deepened with sun and water exposure. There was a colour wheel to use to figure out what the colours should end up like.

It took a long time but we eventually covered the whole cloth. They had to dry and then were ready for the magic. It was so neat putting them in the setting bath and seeing all the colours change! A few rinses in hot and cold water, and we were done! A very fun and productive day.

Laura's completed batik 

Jerome's batik before setting

Jerome's batik after setting -- note the color changes!

The next day, we were scheduled to go diving, and were up and ready to go by 6:30, only to find out it was canceled. We went back to sleep intending on only sleeping for an hour or so, but didn't wake up until the afternoon. So we explored the main street. Very interesting as every shop, house, car, moped has a small offering on it to the spirits. It was also only a few days before Galungan day - a biannual holiday to give thanks to the gods. So everyone was busy making decorations and more complicated offerings for that along the road. After dinner we attended a traditional Kecak and fire dance which was quite impressive. A large circle of men perform a rhythmic chant while dancers act out the story of the Ramayana.

Our last day in Ubud was a bit of a splurge. We'd found this hotel, the Royal Kamuela Villa, with these beautiful villas and decided to stay for one night. We had a private pool, a king sized bed, a bathroom the size of the bedroom. It included afternoon tea, bedtime chocolates and a welcome foot massage. It was heavenly!

That night we also decided to go fancy for dinner and tried Locavore, which had really great food!

Best dish was this bloody mary sorbet with tomato consomme.  Warm soup, cold bloody mary sorbet, super flavorful.

Slow braised oxtail / pan-fried gnocchis / green asparagus & sorrel veloute / egg plant puree / wood sorrel leaves

That wrapped up our time in Ubud, and we reluctantly tore ourselves out of our pool and headed to Amed - on the east coast of Bali. We did a quick stop at a water temple on the way.

In Amed we stayed in a very cute, very efficiently run guesthouse called Geria Geri Shanti. It was also a dive shop, and we spent 5 days there, completing 12 dives, including our first night dives which was very interesting.  Other highlights included diving with huge Manta rays and seeing our first Pygmy seahorses!

There's a lot more pictures in our album!