There’s a reason why the blog has been quiet. We have been heading further north from Chiang Mai after saying goodbye to our friends Scott and Sarah. It is a very special little world up here. Sometimes we go days without spotting another tourist or meeting anyone that speaks English. We order food and bargain room rates by pointing at things and using our little Thai which consists of numbers and “thank you”. The people here are very honest, open and most welcoming. Most places require a bike to get around and it’s best not to expect or research and just go. It is a great adventure. So here’s a…
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Laos to Vietnam Border Crossing & Vice Versa
Border crossings can be interesting to say the least. They are basically the wild west of immigration offices. Where anything goes. Here we have our experience of going from Vietnam to Laos, and how we got majorly scammed. But it also works the other way, as a Laos to Vietnam border crossing. Either way, be warned and on the lookout for scam artists posing as immigration officers. Unfortunately, they know you have no choice! Vietnam to Laos Border Crossing We left Sapa on an overnight sleeper bus heading to Dien Bien Phu. Luckily we had bumped into an Aussie couple at a hotel. We were both exchanging money the same…
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From Trang to Koh Tao – if you’re game
We thought land travel was tricky in Malaysia, seems like we were wrong. There is no efficient nor cost effective way to travel from Trang to Koh Tao. We went to a travel agent and they quoted us about 1300baht each to take a minibus to Surat Thani and then a night ferry to Koh Tao. Our other option was to make our own way to Krabi and stay an extra night, then go with a minibus from Krabi to Surat Thani and take the speedboad. This was 850baht per person, of course excluding the night’s accommodation and trip to Krabi. We really didn’t know and wanted to go the…
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Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Once we had immigrated into Malaysia, we tried to find the local bus terminal that would take us closer to our guest house. We walked past the immigration desks and avoided the JB Sentral sign as we thought this was the train station and continued to the bus terminal downstairs. This however is a coach terminal where most buses were labelled to return back to Singapore or other cities in Malaysia. Back up we went, now following the general flow of people, except they were heading to Woodlands to cross the border back into Singapore. This is not right either. We asked a security guard who told us to go…
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Singapore to Malaysia
So being the cheapos that we are, we decided to take a bus from Singapore to Malaysia. Actually there were several reasons we didn’t want to take a flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. 1. We want to see the scenery of the country, instead of just flying in and out of major cities. 2. Flying in and out takes more time than expected due to checking in time, etc. 3. We have all of the time in the world (except when money runs out) so we’ll take it slow and travel north in our own time. So from Singapore, we took the Red MRT (train) line to Kranji. There,…
