Nightmare Toilets

One of the main taboos for many tourists visiting countries in Asia is the TOILET. I believe every person who has ever visited China would have his/her own little 'horror' stories of the public toilets - no doors, left behind poo (ugh), the 'wonderful' odour emiting from the place, etc. Worse stories are from those who traverse into the interior of the vast country, where even proper toilet cubicles are scarce and tourists are told they will just have to make do with the tall grass as cover! Experienced travellers will tell you this is where an umbrella becomes really handy.

God forbid that I will ever have such encounters!!!

Of course, these scenarios are not limited only to China. Countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. and even Malaysia all offer similar 'experiences' to tourists, especially if one travels further into its countryside and little villages, where facilities are scarce and tourists even more scarce!

Below here is one such toilet we came across in Vietnam. But at least this one had doors. And well, if you have to go, you have to go.......!

Ho Chi Minh Museum

The Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi is really something. I'm glad we took a few hours out from our shopping frenzy to do some 'tourist' stuff and came here! I'd thought that it would be something like the one in Ho Chi Minh City but wow!, I was so mistaken!


It was a really well-planned and well-designed place, and very modern and artistic. More like an art museum. I imagine it must have been planned and designed with the help of the French. Everything was very well documented, and original documents were so well preserved in individual glass casings that could be turned, like pages. If not for the reminders of the Vietnam War, I could have been in a museum in France.

Macau in May

This is my 3rd trip to Macau. Nothing much has changed, except more new major Hotels coming up and the Fisherman's Wharf has finally opened. Although, to our chagrin, we found out the hard way that the shops in Fisherman's Wharf only open at 12 noon! Although many major Hotels like Wynns, Sands, Crown, Venetian have opened, and more upcoming projects like Hard Rock and St. Regis are under construction, most of Macau has not really caught up with the concept of tourism, and especially, mass tourism.

Admittedly, most tourists go to Macau for the casinos. However, the main tourist sight at St. Paul's ruins, although has an abundance of retail shops, does not have a wide choice of F&B outlets. Their widely acclaimed 'most important temple', the A-Ma Temple and Village, was nothing more than, well, a temple. To quote my Aunt, "it looks just like the temple in Kajang."

St. Paul's Ruins

Buying the famous 'Wife' and Almond Biscuits



'Three Lamp Junction' - popular local market

The Venetian Macau

What started out as a small family break in Macau (me and parents = 3) turned out to be a full fledged family outing of 10 persons! Gosh, and I ended up as unofficial tour guide. And for the first time in my life, I did not do any prior proper research, especially in where to eat. Oh well..... So we ended up eating only in the Hotel. Anyhow, it's not such a bad thing anyway, coz don't think Grandfather would have relished the idea of going out to eat much!

We stayed at the Venetian, the most talked about hotel in Macau right now. Stripping away its hype of having the biggest casino in the world, my first impression of the Hotel was somewhat of a letdown. In my mind, I was expecting it to rival Sands Casino Macau, but what I saw was just a plain big square area with not much character. The Hotel is basically a copycat of everything Venetian, without the material quality. One just simply cannot replace marble with plaster. It is just not the same. Sigh.

Boasting 3,000 all-suites, each suite room is approximately 750 square feet. However, it was another let down. With such a huge space, not much thought was really given to the layout of the room. It ended up as a brand new Hotel with an old-fashioned layout.

Connected to the Hotel and Casino, is a huge retail block, the Canal Shoppes, complete with canal, gondolas and singing gondoliers. Shops were mainly on the mid to high end, with tasteful window designs/layouts.

Pisa, Italy?

Most people's memories of their visit to Pisa, Italy will be, well, the Leaning Tower. For me, yes, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was indeed a wondrous sight but it will never beat the experience of getting there and back!

Our agenda for that day was to go to Pisa in the morning and then back to Florence to catch a train to Venice. Boy.......what an incredibly long day it became.

The journey to Pisa was uneventful enough, and upon arriving, we decided to walk from the train station. To save a few Euros, I think this was the First and Worst mistake/decision we made! Due to our slow stroll (took us about 20 mins), by the time we arrived at the Leaning Tower, we realised we had only 1 hour to spare before we had to catch our returning train to Florence.

So we cancelled our guided trip up inside the tower and just hung around outside with everyone else, and snapped some photos.

Then, to our horror, it started to rain. Of course we weren't carrying umbrellas! Luckily it was only for a short few minutes. Started our jaunt back to the train station and made it onto the platform just in time! I seriously believe I have never walked this fast in my life. Reflecting back, I'm actually quite proud of myself! Heh.

Back at the Florence train station, we collected our really-heavy!!!! luggage from the luggage counter, bought some snacks and waited for our Venice train to arrive. Came time to board and dragged our really-heavy!!! luggage up the stairs of the train, squeezed past the passengers to get the luggage rack which HAD to be at the other end of the coach from where we boarded, heaved our really-heavy!!! luggages up the rack, went in search of our seats to discover they were being occupied by a family, and after some sign language and broken English (on their part), found out to our (1st) horror THAT WE HAD BOARDED THE WRONG TRAIN!!! This train was headed for Rome.

So we made a mad-dash back to our really-heavy!!! lugagge, dragged them down, and found to our (2nd) horror that THE DOORS HAD CLOSED!!! Looking around frantically, we could not see any attendants around. This is, after all Europe, where everything is automated and labour cost is sky-high.

So, I did the only thing that I could - I punched on the emergency alarm button. And we just stood there waiting 'calmly' for someone to come whilst the rest of the passengers were looking around and wondering what had just happened to trigger the alarm! In retrospect, luckily no one panicked thinking 'terrorist threat!' Hee hee. Well, in true Italian fashion, the attendant only turned up many many minutes later. After explaining to him and showing him our tickets, he pointed out to us that our train is "there", pointing towards the next train.

By the time they got the doors re-opened, (took another few minutes of walkie-talkie communication back and forth), and we lugged our really-heavy!!! luggage our of the train, we were just in time to see our Venetian-bound train pull away.......

I think my colleague was in a near-panic stage by this time, but I was just so tired that I just flopped down on my really-heavy!!! luggage. Well, we managed to board the next train but it wasn't a direct train. It stopped on the mainland and we had to drag our really-heavy!!! luggage down a flight stairs, cross underneath to the other side, up a flight of stairs to board our connecting train. By the time we arrive proper, it was about 8pm and very dark.

The rest of the night is summarised below, but just to bear in mind, all these was done with our really-heavy!!! luggage:-

1. Boarded water taxi which did not go all the way to our intended stop as indicated on the route map due to the 'late' hour, so had to change water taxi halfway;

2. Walked up and down some flights of stairs along the bridge, across San Marco square (rather eerie and creepy in the dark to 2 very cold and hungry strangers), to our little B&B.

3. Climbed up this little tine steep spirally stairs to the reception to be told that our room is in the annexe block "round the corner".

I think it was the BEST BED I have ever slept on that night.......

I deem that day as an 'Adventure'. I mean, if we'd gone with a tour group, I would never have known that I was capable of brisk walking, sign language, lugging heavy items, and best of all, would never have had the experience of activating a train alarm system :-)

As I was falling asleep, I could only think, "Thank God for small favours. I'm so lucky my really-heavy!!! luggage strap did not break..."

Pisa, Italy?

Break In Bali

Ahhhh......I had my first real break in years over the weekend. All my previous holidays were so hectic, rushing from one place to another with no real time to just rest and relax. Took a short 4D/3N break to Bali and stayed with Kanako.

Now, if I'd known her place was so wonderful, I would've gone much much earlier! It was like a page straight out of some exclusive property magazines, complete with swimming pool, the 'illusion' of a wide open space (a rarity in Bali houses) and tall glassed windows.

Kanako's dining room

The double-storey glassed windows looking out into the pool

For a small pittance, the pool cleaner comes twice a week

The entire weekend's itinerary was just eat, sleep, massage, and then eat, sleep and massage some more. Heavenly.......

Uma Ubud - view of pool and pool bar from the reception lounge

Uma Ubud - koi pond view from the Restaurant

Breakfast with Kanako in Uma

The only photo with me in it, taken on the last day before I left. Too busy doing nothing to take photos!

One word of caution for those planning a trip to Ubud, Bali. Be sure to arm yourselves with good insect repellant and spray every single exposed part of your body. Those little gnat-like insects will attack at every opportunity they get! That was the only drawback of an otherwise perfect weekend break. Will definitely be back!

Thank you to Kanako for the wonderful hospitality, and to Thamu for the recommendation of Cheap and Good Massage :-)

In Search Of A Royal Gift

My 3rd trip to Singapore in 5 months. It's either I don't go at all, or I keep going!

This time, it was to search for a birthday present for one of our Sultans. With alternatives in KL drying up, we decided to try our luck in Singapore. Happily we set out thinking that this will be a piece of cake. After all, it's Singapore! A country that's famous for its shopping, and it will definitely have everything, including something that's fit for royalty. Boy, were we wrong.

After all the traipsing, we ended up with only ONE suitable item ~ a beautiful black glass vase with gold and silver trimmings, that was actually within our budget. Hooray! Mission accomplished and we have the rest of our trip to do our own shopping. Alas, our elation was shortlived as we found out the next day that HRH already has this particular piece. And so, we are back to Square One.

The ill-fated vase



We went through all other alternatives in our minds but to no avail.

Luckily, we had better luck with our second 'mission' - that of looking for a possible tenant for the Hotel. Our first choice 'Flair', had no plans for expansion at the moment and we were at wits' end when we were directed to another shop 'Anthropology' which worked on the same concept as Flair and had some similar items stocked. Managed to make contact with them and hopefully something will come out of this meeting.

Window display at Flair

Sneak preview of Anthropology

The rest of our time were spent exploring the 'touristy sights' of Singapore - the shopping malls :-) Managed to cover Chinatown, Raffles City and part of Orchard Road. I must say that the 'results' here were definitely more satisfactory and we managed to stuff our limited overnight luggage to well within the 15kg weight limit of Air Asia! That's also a personal record for me, as 99% of the time, my luggage has always been overweight, irregardless of what airline I take.

Scarlet Hotel.....where we made our base

The ULTIMATE durian pancake at Goodwood Park - this was the one thing that made this trip totally worthwhile!!! YUMMY!

Came across these 2 very interesting items (which we ended up buying of course) - door stoppers!

And finally, my fixation with pigs.....well, there were a lot of them in Singapore! In all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Of course, our trip could not just end smoothly, something just had to go wrong. As we were flying back on Air Asia, we just automatically assumed that it will be departing from the budget terminal. The First Mistake we made was thinking that Terminal 3 was the Budget Terminal, which obviously, we found out the hard way that it wasn't! With 5 items of luggage between the 2 of us, we had to go in search of another taxi to bring us to the Budget Terminal from Terminal 3.

After another struggle with loading the pieces of baggage onto the trolley, imagine our chagrin when we couldn't find our flight on the list of departing flights on the departure screen! The very nice lady at the service counter told us with absolute confidence that Air Asia takes off from Terminal 1. I seriously believe she must have repeated this piece of information many many times to just as many unsuspecting passengers like us!

So off we went again in search of another taxi to take us across the road to Terminal 1. By then, my already pounding head just expanded another 2-fold, and by the time we landed in KL I was experiencing a full-fledged migraine.


Me and Ju, my partner in crime :-)

What a 3D/2N. Really looking forward to my coming break in Bali.....