Onward to the End of the World...

So it's been awhile, I know. The truth is I've been so distracted by all the things we've been doing. This period of our travels marked a lot of traveling and rushing from place to place. We flew the 20th of January to Bali and spent three or four days in Kuta and Legian before heading to Gili Trawangan aka the most beautiful place in the world.

On the full day journey to Gili T., we met two guys from England and two from New Zealand. We had a great time enjoying the sun and beaches, learning to surf, and the most incredible diving ever! For $74 we did two dives and saw so many cool things such as banded sea snakes, cuttlefish, an octopus, white tip reef shark (including a pregnant one!), sea turtles, anenome crabs, sweet lip snapper, banner fish, damsels, sponges, fan coral.... I can go on and on. The visability was about 20 meters (about 69 ft) in the warm water of Indonesia. I could certainly live in Bali with a summer home in Gili T. Anyone care to join? Real estate is super cheap, their practically giving away beachfront property.

Anyway, from Gili T. I left early to get to the airport to pick Wes up on Feb. 2. Alison and I split up for four painful days of separation anxiety! However, it was really great to see Wes and spend a few days wandering around the sweaty streets of Kuta and Ubud. He and I did an island tour to all of the temples in Bali as well as ate lunch at a rooftop restaurant overlooking a lake and volcano. On our tour we were with an older couple from Bevelry Hills, of course. They were quite pleasant and interesting to talk to.

Then Alison came with our two British friends and we spent two more days in Ubud. We went to the Monkey Forest Sanctuary and got plenty of cute photos with cheeky monkeys as they chased us down for bananas and rambutans (lychees). Then, we said our goodbyes to the guys and headed back down to stinky, touristy Kuta to buy up some gifts and ship a package home. Thank god! Our bags are easily 5k lighter! We flew out back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Feb. 11.

In KL, we wandered around and saw the Batu Caves which were quite beautiful and then spent another day traveling to Jerantut and the Taman Negara, the National Forest/Jungle. It was so beautiful. Wes and I hiked around in the heat up to the Canopy walk, the longest one in the world at about 450 meters! It was pretty intimidating at first, especially since I'm not a big fan of heights. The Canopy Walk is 50 meters high and consists of a slew of ropes and cables and a narrow plank of wood on which to walk. Wes spent the majority of the time laughing at me freaking out in the middle of the rope-swing-like walkway.

The next day we woke up early and hiked on the other side of the jungle to reach the bat caves. We talked to some locals and the gave us a rough guideline on how to get through the caves. Long story short we spent the better part of an hour crawling the heaps of guano and ducking out of the way while hundreds of bats flew over head in dark, clammy, low-cielinged caves. We made it out alive enough to hope on a 30 hour bus to boat to boat to bus to minivan journey to get to Koh Lanta.