Land of Gnomes. And Trolls!

Figuring out how to start these posts off is always the hardest part. That and actually bringing myself to write the thing. Some start with the journey, some start with the decision making process, some start halfway through the trip, then the introduction sort of helps tell me how to structure the rest of it, do I go through chronologically reeling off everything that happened, do I jump about randomly as though I'm too easily distracted to be able to finish a thought in one go, or do I spend most of the post waffling, then briefly mention that we also went on holiday somewhere in the last paragraph? 

I don't really know this time. 

The journey probably does warrant a mention just because of how remarkably uneventful it was, it was probably the most stress-free travelling ever. No queues at security, leaving plenty of time to stop and have a meal before flying. Flight was shorter than advertised, no queues at passport control, and a (pre-booked) taxi driver waiting for us as soon as we arrived. We did take our lives into our hands slightly because he drove us to the hotel in a Tesla though, but thankfully it didn't explode on this occasion.

   

In case you are in any way curious, the destination we had arrived in was Bergen in Norway. At least we think so, the hillside by the airport wasn't quite sure where we were. 

Bergen turned out to be that somewhat unusual sort of place where it seemed like everyone I spoke to had already been. As though it's one of those places that everyone goes, and no-one had told me about it.

Our trip had 3 full days and we managed to fit in quite a bit, especially since for one of the wettest cities in the world, we had glorious sunshine the whole time we were there.

On the first day, we walked around Bryggen (that's all the old wooden buildings along the port that feature on all the Burgen fridge magnets), went to an indoor zoo, then rode the funicular train up the hill. It's much like a regular train, but slanted so all the sections are stepped up from each other to level it out. Basically, the train would be crazy if you moved it onto a track on level ground.

From the top you get an excellent view across Bergen, and if like us, you only buy a one-way train ticket, you also get a nice walk back down the hill, which is definitely worth it, you walk through the forest on the way down, and down is so much easier than up, probably even easier still if you actually stick to the paths.

Which we didn't. All along the path down there's little "shortcuts" that take you down little barely there stone and mud paths, which are much harder to navigate as you scramble your way downhill, it is much more likely you'll find trolls though, weirdly, we did not, however hard I looked. When we arrived back on the main path, there was a sense of relief that we had made it. until we saw another little path slightly further on. After falling over or otherwise sustaining minor injuries walking down one, we decided to stick to the path the next time we found one though.

For the second day, Rachael had found an outdoor museum called 'Old Bergen' a village made to look like it was from Bergen in the past, with actors playing a series of villagers. It was a 10 minute bus ride away, or for a bit more money (probably), a 50 minute boat ride away. Naturally, we took the boat.

Inside there were a series of buildings, including homes, shops and a school set up to look like they would have done, with a series of villagers either being remarkably relaxed about strangers traipsing through their homes, or putting on little scenes in the square. In this one this young delivery man (who was previously a dentist) is proposing to his girlfriend (who was previously married I believe to a trader - I believe these were probably all different characters)

Arriving by Beffen (the boat) gave us 20% of the admission price, and also the same discount off admission to the aquarium, so, we decided to get off at the aquarium and go there on the way back (damn you for the effective marketing strategy!)

The aquarium was quite a good one, it had outdoor areas with seals, otters and penguins, all the fish and crustaceans you would expect, and also crocodiles in the basement.

On the last day we took another boat trip, this one was a bit further, out to the fjords and too see some nice waterfalls

Oh but I do get to make a callback to a 16 year old bit:

The Bergen Dog

A good hot-dog, made with proper sausages. I found the original time I did this, and it was all structured with ratings and so on. I can't be bothered doing that, but here's a photo.

Slightly ominous sound effects

15 years. 15 consecutive calender years between 2005 and 2019. I obtained my first passport in 2005 at 18 years of age, and in every subsequent year, I left the country at least once (Don't go back and check, because this only goes back to 2007 anyway).

And then we arrived in 2020, and in 2020 and 2021, for some reason we didn't go anywhere.

Ok, it wasn't just 'for some reason', I think we are all aware that the reason was the global pandemic, nowhere was safe, except locked up inside my house.

It wasn't the hassle of mandatory self-isolation, or mandatory testing that put us off, we could have handled that, and we definitely wouldn't have been 'those' people ending their holidays early to get home before isolation orders came into effect, because seriously, if you are rushing home from a holiday, in order to make it to work, your priorities are incredibly out of order and you need to slow down and take stock of your life for a minute. Here's a free life-hack for everyone if this ever happens again, if you return from a holiday during a mandated stay at home order for anyone returning from abroad, you have a free excuse for NOT showing up at work, that is enshrined in law. You are welcome.

No, the reason we didn't go away was because, seriously, did you not read any of the news? There was a global pandemic going on, and we didn't fancy getting sick. Also, when I'm on holiday, the various activities and the eating out at restaurants is the holiday, I'm not entirely sure what's left to do if you show up somewhere and everywhere is closed. Anyone?

Ok, so seeing as it is still 2022 now, and I have taken this blog down from the attic, blown off the dust and plopped 8 brand new size C batteries under the slightly cracked rear cover, you've probably already figured out that the travelling drought that was the first 2 years of this decade, was ended recently. Which it was.

We did a bit of proverbial toe-dipping by making 1 trip to Llandudno and 2 to Sheffield in order to watch snooker, and found those trips were fine, no issues whatsoever. So shortly afterwards, we were talking and we said, "Hey, maybe we should do that thing we like to do, you know the one, where we're in a place that isn't our house for a little while, where the weather is nicer, and we spend a bunch more money because we'll eat out every day".

The word we were looking for was 'Holiday', naturally, after such a long time, the lingo had eluded us.

So, approximately one week later, we found ourselves in sunny Montenegro, specifically, Kotor on the Adriatic sea.

Now comes the portion of the evening where I can punctuate my lines of text using images collected from my phone. We arrived on a Wednesday, several hours before the check-in time, and phoned the renter to ask if we could leave our bags anywhere. She said yes, then showed up and just let us in. That set the tone really for the rest of the holiday, everyone was just nice. 

We had an apartment overlooking a small river just outside the old town (which can be seen just towards the right hand side of this picture from the balcony).

After a walk and something to eat in the old town, the majority of day 1 was done, but we made the most of our time here and every day had a different activity of some description.

Oo, actually, lets do it like this:

Day 2 (Slightly ominous sound effect)

Day 2 took us on a walk along the coast where we followed a footpath between a small pebble beach and the road (which actually coincidentally separated a handful of restaurants from their outdoor eating areas, bringing to mind a level  from overcooked where a road separates a kitchen from the serving area. though in this scenario, the road was pretty quite and the waiters weren't working against the clock).

As we approached the end of the walkable stretch of coastline, we were offered a boat ride for a lower price than we had seen along the way, so we accepted. By the miracle of story telling, we can now jump straight to that boat ride as though that happened instantaneously and not a couple of hours later, when we had to return.

Our first stop was Our Lady of The Rocks, one of 2 tiny islands near the mouth of Kotor Bay, it consisted of a church and a gift shop and... yea.

The first interesting thing about the island is it is completely man made, and it is built upon the remains of sunken ships due to a history of attempted invasions being thwarted by blocking off the one entrance to the bay.

The other interesting thing is the gift shop (not now, now it's just a place to grab a magnet or a large novelty pencil), but it's original purpose was as a room to settle blood feuds. Feuding families would be locked inside the building, and would not be allowed out until the feud was settled. Or one of them was dead (though I suppose that does settle a feud too).

Next up was the submarine tunnels, or at least one of them, there are 3 of them hidden in the mountainside, all connected together so they can be walked between on foot, which were dug out by hand using slave labour from a local prison and used to repair submarines in secret with camouflaged gates that could be closed and the tunnels would be invisible to passing planes.

Next up was the island prison. I don't think it was the same one used for slave labour. Annoyingly this used to be a tourist spot that you could visit with many of the rooms and facilities still intact, but in the infinite wisdom of the government, it's been effectively bulldozed in favour of a large Hotel and Casino, because hooray for Capitalism eh?

Most interesting about passing this spot was my phone welcomed me to Croatia. So for a brief moment, I could have phoned or texted people without paying the extortionate roaming charges still present in Montenegro. Not that I really needed to.

The final (intended) stop of the boat tour was to the blue cave, which is a cave, where the water looks blue. This is the obligatory stop on any boat tour where you are allowed some time to swim.

No-one did. We were in the wrong shoulder season really, so the sea was far too cold, also, we had just been battered by winds while making our way out here, personally I was in no rush to make the journey back more uncomfortable.

This meant there was leftover time to visit Perast, a tiny coastal town facing the lady of the rocks from before. Only about 20 minutes though, so a quick wander down the coast to buy a small bottle of some ginger juice and return just in time to head back. 

On the boat we got chatting to a couple sat next to us, a lady from Montenegro and her husband from Liverpool (I believe it is one of the natural laws of the universe that you are guaranteed to find a scouser wherever you are in the world), she told us about a sort of pastry she enjoyed that you could buy from a bakery. I had forgotten the name by the time we entered a bakery a couple of days later, but I saw something that looked like what she had described, a sort of filled pastry, it was large, I thought we should at least try it, so thought we could get one to share and see if we liked it. I pointed to it and asked what it was. Not understanding me, she picked it up and wrapped it up for me. A moment later seemingly having not heard this attempted interaction, Rachael had the same idea upon spotting these items herself and came to the counter alongside me and asked what it was. Therefore we walked out with 2 of the things.

Day 3 (The same ominous sound effect)

Day 3 would become the day of the secret beach. We started the day by walking, this time heading in the opposite direction around the bay towards a part of the area we did look at apartments in. The area was quieter with smaller unlit roads, and down by the coastline was a tiny little pebble beach surrounded by a hill with trees, with no-one on it.

For the time we sat there, this beach was ours, we sat and read and we skimmed stones on the water, but not at the same time due to the risk of accidentally skimming e-readers across the water.

While walking back, we realised how we were glad we hadn't booked an apartment on this side, it was nice, that wasn't the problem, but walking along small coastal roads without pavements is fine during the day, but at night would have been a different story, and could effectively have given us a daylight curfew, or a necessity to take a taxi home if we found ourselves out in the old town at night. Which we generally were.

Day 4 (You know the sort of sound I mean? Like 2 notes, would sort of accompany text on a screen perhaps indicating the time or how long is left, as the scenes inbetween escalate up to something)

If you've been keeping track, Day 4 is a Saturday, and on this day we headed to the bus station and took a trip out of Kotor to Budva.

Budva is larger than Kotor with much larger hotels and beaches and is presumably a more popular tourist destination. Budva also has an old town, with similar tight streets, but without quite so many cats (Which are interestingly, 2 facts about Kotor I have yet to impart).

We stopped at a small restaurant and ate a pizza, where apparently someone on the next table mistook me for a waiter. This Guy. The one in shorts and a hawaiian shirt. He was sitting down and asked me if this table was ok. I replied, 'Yes. This one is our table'.

After a short walk through a park, where we stopped for a read, we headed back to the bus station and enjoyed the little zoo outside it. We had already come across it on the way out, but there was no point mentioning it twice, but this time, one of the rabbits stuck it's nose through the fence for Rachael to tickle him.

We returned to Kotor in time to see stages being set up, so we stuck around to watch the music later on.

The band were more or less what you would expect, guitarists, drummer and singer doing covers and songs in Montenegrin I could not understand, but that was when we discovered we had shown up for our holiday at the time they were celebrating their independence day, which was nice (Although, had we known in advance that no shops would be open for a large chunk of our holiday, we might have done some stocking up in advance of the weekend)

Day 5 (Something like that 'dun dun' at the start of law and order, I always thought that sound effect seemed a bit out of place, because it is sort of ominous, but I thought law and order was basically a procedural? Maybe it is secretly a horror, I don't know)

On this day, we began with something of a lazy day, but the day had other ideas.

We went out for a walk, we walked to the end of our road and came to a hill, the hill looked like it led to the castle on the top, the sky was a little dull and the air seemed cooler than normal, so we went for a stroll, a nice leisurely 2 hour stroll up a hill. In the scorching heat. Because of course the drop in temperature was a lie and the sun came back out to batter us on the way up.

It was fine really, and we really did take it at a leisurely pace, the return journey only took 45 minutes, but on the way up we kept stopping to rest and admire the view. As well as the goats.

That's where the hill could lead to, a goat farm, we stopped and watched the goats for quite a bit when we saw them, but we didn't continue on up towards the goat farm itself, we diverted so we could continue to walk towards the wall.

And then we made it, all the way up to the castle on the top of the hill.

Well, the outside of it at least, with a small rickety ladder, perched precariously on the edge of the rocks just outside the wall, leading up to a window which was much smaller on the inside than the outside, accompanied by a sign warning people not to attempt access through the window. We decided that it was probably best not to disobey the sign in this instance. This picture doesn't do justice to the positioning of the ladder, in the picture, it looks like there is plenty of room where it is stood. There was not.

Day 6 (Just to clarify, I'm not actually building to something sinister, there's no general narrative and finale event coming, this is just a series of disparate events tied together by the fact that they all happened while we were in a different country for a few days, otherwise known as a holiday.) (Also Dun dun)

On Day 6 we wandered down to the markets they have outside the old town and bought some fruits (Strawberries if memory serves) and a couple of fancy cheeses.

What? I did warn you I wasn't building to anything, the days can't all be action packed and full of boat rides and ladders. Would it help if I said the bakery story from earlier may have belonged in this day? I just told it early, because it paired with the couple on the boat.

Also, in the evening, I ordered fish, and she filleted it right at the table, which was pretty cool. She asked if I wanted the head. I did not.

Day 7 (Pressing the sound effect button appears to have no effect, maybe it's broken. I press it again, still nothing. I ask that you imagine the sound effect is playing again, because we appear to be having some technical difficulties)

So on day 7 (Dun Dun) Damn you butt..(Dun Dun).

Day 7 became... That thing isn't going to go off again is it? No, I think we're good. Day 7 became our cultural day, where we thought we would visit the museums and such that Kotor had to offer.

We started with an art gallery not far from the main square. We walked in to a lovely and cool building, occupied only by a man sat near the door. As we entered, he stood and told us extremely apologetically, that the entrance fee was 5 euros.

We genuinely assumed from his tone he was about to tell us the place was closed, I've never had someone so apologetic while telling us the price of something. And it was for a good cause, the gallery we had entered was the gallery of solidarity, which was created following an earthquake in 1979 which devastated a large part of the surrounding area, where they collected artworks from all across Yugoslavia (as it was at the time).

A particular favourite of mine was a painting of Our Lady of The Rocks, mostly because I was able to recognise it and recognise it was painted from Perast.

The art gallery was only small, 3 rooms of artworks that we were told rotated through their 400 strong collection. But the ticket price was not just for this gallery and the feeling you get for contributing a small amount to a solidarity fund, they also allowed entrance to St Pauls Church and St Michaels Church.

So when we left, we dutifully followed his directions to St Pauls and found a massive church building, which was undergoing renovations, so it also had a guy on a ladder with a 'Don't mind me, go about your tourism' vibe. Up some stairs was an outdoor museum with shelves of old pieces of ornate stonework.

And we next made our way over to St Michaels, which was another display of old pieces of ornate stonework. But this time, everything was numbered and we had little binders telling us what everything was, and this to the right was... one of them. Yes sorry I didn't take notes.

The last stop on our cultural tour was the cat museum, this wasn't on the same ticket as the other 3, it had it's own entrance fee, and collected artworks, coins, medals, album covers, anything at all to do with cats and displayed them for us the visitors to peruse.

Because did I mention the cats at all?

Kotor

is

absolutely

packed

full

of

them!

Ok. I am willing to concede that maybe the last one was a rat and was not in Kotor, but it doesn't make it any less true about the number of cats in Kotor.

(dun dun).

It's ok, I was finished anyway.

(And Rachael was worried I wouldn't remember everything if I waited a few weeks to write this thing)

A post focused entirely on our trip to Milan in 2019

 Who remembers 2019?

Do you see what 2020 has made me do? Because of the sheer ridiculousness of the present year, it has forced me to start a blog post as though I am a rubbish stand-up comedian. And it get's worse, because following several years of complete rank stupidity, it has become trite to criticize a single full circuit of the sun based upon the completely arbitrary points we have declared as the start and end of the 365 day cycle, which we have labelled with an arbitrary number based on when someone in Rome decided we should begin counting once.

All that is to say, sorry for calling 2020 ridiculous, it's just a year and it was wrong of me to suggest the previous one was much better just because I could go outside.

But yes, 2019, that near forgotten time when you could go on holiday without the fear of catching a deadly virus, or, worse (based on the insane people racing home before a 4am deadline a few weeks ago) being made to stay home with your family for a couple of weeks. (I mean seriously, where does anyone have to go that desperately that staying home is such an imposition? Don't say work. No-ones job is so important that their colleagues will be unable to cope for an additional 2 weeks).

I keep trying to talk about 2019, but it is possible that the year 2020 has had a far larger impact upon my writing than was initially intended. I'm sure it's fine, you probably wouldn't have noticed had I not pointed it out to you. Go back and look though. It's subtle but it's there.

We made use of our capacity to share a small flying breathing space with hundreds of similarly minded travelicians to spend a couple of days in Milan.

I had to check myself and confirm that this was in fact out only trip last year, and it was due to inconsistent work patterns and the fact that we decided to watch as much of the World Snooker Championship as possible in lieu of a holiday  (in person at the crucible, TV watching habits have a limited impact upon our travel plans).

We booked ourselves into an AirBnB near the city centre, which gave use our own apartment and that brief feeling of being a local as you share your common areas with people who actually live there. Plus a really nice welcome basket from the owner filled with jams and those hard things that look like bread.

Unfortunately it rained while we were in Milan, but that is something that can be expected. When you take your holiday after the end of summer you're always rolling the weather dice and you know that any nice weather you do get is residual and left over from the summer you chose not to holiday during. But as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, take those lemon skins and stitch them together into a makeshift fruit umbrella. I think that's how it goes.

In this case, our makeshift fruit umbrella was one of those open top tour buses. Something we had never done while on holiday was ride around on an open top bus, but as it turns out, they have a canopy style roof for when it rains so you can still enjoy the sights, albeit the somewhat much greyer sights. Also, open top buses are perhaps the most touristy thing it is possible to do and I needed to balance out that brief local feeling.

Due to being on a loop and being intended to allow hopping on and off, open top bus tickets last for a period of days and cover all of the routes, so we took advantage and traveled all of the routes. Including the one that visited all of the sporting attractions like the football pitch and the local teams headquarters or whatever you would call the building adorned with footballers labelled with one of the teams names.

It wasn't all rain and buses, we actually got off the buses in some locations and some of the days, the weather was quite nice. Here was a... building we visited. I really need to start taking notes.

I don't have a story about this picture, I just like it. I like how you can see some of the actual street the photograph is situated on around it. It isn't the same location behind it, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this image while I was just trawling through my photographs looking for things to share, so I decided that I would.

So yes, a quiet year for holidays abroad, but no matter, I'm sure we'll get to visit lots of places in 2020...

Rendang

I started writing a blog about our most recent holiday almost as soon as we came back from it. Following the multi-year hiatus of this blog, I returned to it and filled in the gaps, it became obvious that the best way to write the blogs was to do it immediately, when the holiday is still fresh and I can recall specific details that otherwise get forgotten.

So, what happened? Why didn't I finish? Sure, I was busy and I needed to prioritise university work when I had time in front of a computer, then time just started to get away from me, weeks had turned into months, the year ended and we drove headfirst into the new year, before I knew it, we were halfway through it and the couple of paragraphs I had written remained in my drafts, looking odd and alien, they didn't appear to be words I had written, but some stranger who had just returned from a holiday.

That's the excuse anyway. I don't think that's the reason for the delay, or at least it's not the only reason for the delay. If I'm being honest with myself (and by writing it down here, you) the reason it never materialised was the holiday itself. How on earth could I write something that lived up to the holiday?

But I hear you say 2 things. First of all, you went to Costa Rica the previous year, it was the greatest place you had ever been and that appeared online within weeks. Second of all, this entire blog is total shit, so what makes you so up yourself that you think any of your writings could "live up" to a holiday? Wanker.

I would respond asking you to mind your language and point out that that is a very subjective matter, please stop shaking your head and tutting at me, no-ones asking you to read it. Oh, I did? Never mind then. With regards to Costa Rica, yes I agree, but I was around 18 months younger and 18 months stupider back then, I was more cavalier in my attitude towards sharing an experience. Plus, I was able to do that whole bit about the name of the blog, which gave me a good intro.

Following a career change, I had found myself working away from home during the week, only arriving home on a Friday evening, before leaving again on a Sunday evening. Obviously, we're not living in the past, due to video calling services like Skype, those weekends weren't the only times we spoke, but quality time had been compressed into those 48 hours. This had also impacted upon Rachael's ability to take time away from work, many months had passed since Romania.

The holiday had to be good. Really good. Plus 2018 saw our 10 year anniversary, so something needed to mark that too.

So where could we go to:

• Make up for a prolonged loss of quality time
• Celebrate 10 years together
• That at least matched Costa Rica in terms of quality?

Piece of cake.

Costa Rica was originally inspired by a television advert, this holiday was also inspired by TV. On new years day on a slightly obscure channel somewhere in the deeper recesses of Freeview, there was a show about Sloths in Costa Rica. We had absolutely loved Costa Rica and we had seen sloths, so we watched with great interest. Right after the sloths, was a similar show, this one was about an orangutan sanctuary. There were so many of them, being looked after, being mischievous and being released released into the wild.  It turned out to be the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Borneo.

The show stuck with us, we decided to go to Borneo to try and see some Orangutans. As a matter of fact, we went to the very same place we had seen on the TV.

Following the longest flight we had ever been on and a change in Kuala Lumpar airport, we arrived at Sandakan Airport in the Sabah region of the Malaysian part of Borneo where we were met by our tour operator and taken to the Sepilok Nature resort to begin our holiday.

In the resort, we had a Chalet right in the jungle, where on our first morning, we were treated to an Orangutan climbing over our roof and off into the trees. We also got it on video, but that's just for us.

You could see them much closer if you actually went to the Rehabilitation Centre, but that isn't quite as special.

We were in Sepilok for 2 nights, during which time, we walked around a Rainforest, we visited the Orangutan Sanctuary and before moving onto the next part of the holiday, the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre.

The Bornean Sun Bear is unsurprisingly from its name, only found in Borneo, so these were somewhat special. Plus, a lady showed me how to take a photograph through the telescope things that they have.

Yes, pretty much all of the photos in this blog are going to be of animals, we were in a jungle, that's what you see in the jungle.

The Orangutan Sanctuary and the Sun Bears were on the second day of our trip, after we had already checked out of our Chalet, now we were part of a tour group and following the timetable of our tour group.

We don't normally go for "activity holidays" or even usually visit places with a tour-guide, but we wanted to see as much as we could while we were there, so it was an interesting change to spend almost every moment of the next few days with the same group of people, there was us, a couple from the Netherlands with their young son and a couple from Portugal. We set off up the kinabatangan river for the next part of the journey, the river lodge.

We did everything together, we would awake first thing in the morning for boat rides and we would eat every meal together. During evening meals it was compulsory to wear the traditional Malayan Sarong, as you can see, I could not pull it off.

While out on the river, the main objective was to see as much wildlife as we could, our tour guide seeming to have an incredible knack for spotting animals almost completely hidden from view.

On the way, we were able to see some Pygmy Elephants (Surprisingly, by their name, not actually small), we saw birds, snakes, crocodiles and a lot of Monkeys, the most interesting of which is probably the Proboscis Monkey.

Around this river, the Proboscis Monkey is very common, so we saw a lot of them, but they are interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, however common they are in Borneo, that is the only place in the world they can be found. But also, they are interesting because of their large noses.

It's not completely clear in this image, but they have large protruding noses, Males tend to be larger, with the largest noses being the most attractive to the females, but the monkeys having large noses like they do, gives them a sort of human quality, it makes them look like little old men climbing around in the trees.

After 2 nights on the river, it was time to return to dry land and separate from our tour group for the final part of our trip. We flew from Sandakan airport over to Kota Kinabalu.

The whole trip was booked in one go through a travel agency, we didn't pay a huge amount of attention to the specifics, we just wanted the Jungle bit at the start, then a resort bit afterwards to have a relaxing summer break, so it was something of a surprise that the resort bit was a little bit different to what we're used to.

We're used to an apartment, somewhere to sleep, relax and a base from which to visit the places we want to go. This place was pure luxury, it had everything you could need on site, restaurants, shops and the like, as well as everything you absolutely don't want on holiday (a gym).

And the food. Now there were a couple of different restaurants, for instance, on our first night, we ate at a Teppanyaki restaurant, where you can watch in fascination as someone cooks your food in-front of you. Have you ever watched someone make egg-fried rice? It's amazing.

But the most amazing place was the buffet restaurant, which also happened to be where breakfast was served. This is the seafood section. If I remember correctly, after that is sushi, carry on around and there are different meats waiting to be carved for you, different currys (plus the Rendang, oh my god, Beef Rendang) a desert section and almost anything you can think of.

It's a little different for breakfast, they take away the chocolate fountains and add omelette chefs and beef bacon. You may not think you want to eat curry for breakfast, but believe me. You do.

Now that I've finished salivating, I should probably talk about some of the things we could do there, despite the comfort and luxury, we managed to fill lots of time on activities on this part of the island too, there was a night time walk, where I saw what turned out to be a deadly python and we went canoeing, which was hard work.

And we played Jenga and ended up with a stupidly large tower, look at that, the bottom is ridiculous and there is maybe one possible move left. Unsurprisingly, this fell on the next turn.

And then we came home (Malaysian airlines helpfully providing a visual representation of the journey there for me) with only our memories, our photographs, and a real hankering for more Beef Rendang.