Home time

Home time today! I fly back to Auckland after just over 24h stop in Sydney. I took the shuttle from the hostel to the airport instead of the train as it was AUD7 cheaper (AUD12 instead of nearly AUD18). It takes just a little bit longer; both modes have their overhead times (eg walking to/from […]

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Sydney nightstop

Scoot check-in for my 0145 flight to Sydney was swift without any queue as I turned up early. I stayed landside till I got hungry so I could have a snack of McDonald’s prawn burger and sweet potato chips. On board the aircraft, the doors closed and I was surprised to see so many spare […]

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Garden city-state stopover

Quite unusually the queue for my AirAsia flight bagdrop was quite long at Kuching. My flight to Singapore left a few minutes early, which is quite usual for the airline.  Prior to arrival, the “death sentence for drugs” recorded PA was made (quite normal).  But there was a new PA this time about the prohibition […]

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Eating in Nepal

  Food in Nepal is a nice mix of Nepali food, Indian and Tibetan (which is in turn quite like some kinds of Chinese food)…. Posted by Alex Chan on Wednesday, September 2, 2015

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Family time again

Above:  Kuching is a bit hazy this visit with the slash-and-burn of forests in preparation for agriculture in Indonesia.  The transit “hassles” in Colombo made the 2h10 transit go really quickly. We boarded the Malaysia Airlines B737-800 for the 3h40 flight to Kuala Lumpur departing at 0055 and arriving at 0705 due to the time […]

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Beginning of the end

Today is the beginning of the end when I finish the adventures and relaxation and proceed to Kuching for time with family before flying back to reality in Auckland in less than two weeks.  We had set the alarm for 0600 to catch breakfast at the hotel before getting on the 0730 dhoni to Male. […]

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Dive day

We did two dives during our stay at Maafushi. Most people would probably consider the dives we experienced to be quite good, but I am fortunate that I can access top-class sites like Sipadan relatively easily.  So, the dives we had here were OK.  Diving does depend on luck and exactly which dive site you […]

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Maafushi

Introduction We did two dives at Maafushi (a handy but beautiful island only about 90 minutes from Male). There were three dive operators on the island. Shark Diving & Watersports (which we dived with because they were straight up and no-nonsense). They gave us a discounted price of USD35 per dive including all equipment (without discussing […]

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An affordable and accessible paradise

We were pleased to see our noisy mainland neighbours move out today. Little did we know till the evening that a bigger group of mainlanders were moving in. After breakfast, Kim spent a bit of time catching up with friends on the internet till mid-morning when we walked to the beaches. We walked east past […]

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Our island escape

Despite the 2h time difference, I woke up surprisingly early at 0745. We both wanted a sluggish start and didn’t take breakfast till 0845. In view of our 1500 departure to Maafushi, we opted to stay in till check-out at 1200. I edited photos while Kim read his book. We had lunch at a waterfront […]

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