Asia 2023

Driving.. Driving.. Well, getting used to the left side traffic didn't take more than half an hour but the road to Sepilok was surprisingly long, seems I underestimated the distance on the slow mountain roads a bit. Around midnight during the last kilometers we also broke a tyre on the road potholes and had to replace it with a spare one. Luckily we at least had the spare tyre and the broken one can be taken care of tomorrow.

Sepilok has an orangutang rehabilitation center, which is our program for tomorrow morning before driving the rest of the way to the diving destination, Semporna.

Metro to the airport, an easy 2h flight and we arrived to Borneo island, to Kota Kinabalu airport. Time to fetch our rental car and get used to left side traffic again.

Arrived to Singapore after a long feeling flight. Didn't sleep much on the plane and Turkish Airlines 787 seats were not that good for my liking, so it was not the most comfortable flight. Well, survived.

We arrived in the morning Singapore time, so we could immediately go exploring the city before checking in to our capsule hotel. Don't know if it can really be called exploring though, more like a zombie walk through some of the city parks... It will be early bedtime today to survive the sleepless light and the jetlag.

First stop reached. It's lovely weather in Istanbul, +1C with wind gusting at 46 knots and raining everything between ice, snow and water. Well, some food and a comfortable hotel.

Unfortunately the flight was delayed an hour or two due to the weather, so missed a hamam visit for today as they already closed. Maybe tomorrow..

It's time to escape the winter again, as we finally found reasonably priced flights to a warm place. Somehow all the flights have been very expensive this winter, I guess due to tourism reviving after corona, increased fuel prices and so on. Well over 1000eur per person with only hand luggage to Asia did not sound so appealing.. Well, Turkish Airlines finally sold us nice tickets to Singapore for a half cheaper price.

The preliminary plan is to spend a day in Singapore after an overnight stop in Istanbul, then take a flight to Kota Kinabalu and drive through Borneo jungle for diving at Sipadan island. After that we should slowly make our journey towards Thailand via Kuala Lumpur and spend a couple of weeks on my favourite island, Koh Tao.