Adventures leads to happiness and vomiting

(Trekking through Erawan Waterfalls – camped out here for new year’s eve… I would have been caught in the Bangkok bombings  if we hadn’t stayed for one extra night!  …a major bus loop I always use was bombed that night…)

The holidays season was eventful for me.  Sitting here in my cousin’s room trying to update my blog is a little bit strange.  First I’m on her computer, second I just arrived in Sydney (Australia, that is), and third I’m getting over food poisoning.  Its been an eventful last couple of weeks with its ups and downs… traveling with friends and meeting up with family have definitely been the ups, but then there’s the downs of being stressout by all the traveling, planning, and not including getting sick (again).  Oh, the joys of life!  And, did I mention the craziness in Bangkok in the past couple of weeks (like the bombings on New Years eve?)

(If you’re ever watched the movie “The Bridge over River Kwai”, this is the bridge it was based on.  This Thai-Buma railway line was a major strategic point in WWII with the Japanese.  They used thousands of POWs to build this bridge, of which many thousands died trying… now its a tourist attraction and is actually not that big… but we had fund cycling around town and checking out this and other sites)

(Snorkelling in Malaysia…. actually had a family reunion back in Kota Kinabalu and had a chance to take a day trip out to Sipa island off the coast of the city.  Its a pretty small island with some nice and secluded places to snorkel and swim… we just had to trek through some of the island to find these places, otherwise it would’ve been sharing the beach with boats, divers, garbage and other distractions)

Sorry I removed this photo…

(This was taken just before heading back on the boat to get back to the mainland.  At first, I thought the black thing in the background was a shark, but upon closer inspection, it was just a old garbage bag… hmm… even if this is a national park, garbage in the sea knows no boundaries!)

(One of the stops on our tour through Sandakan, my dads home town, was to check out the “jungle” house where all my dad’s brothers and sisters grew up.  We thought that it was deep in the jungle, but were happy to find out that it was just over a small ravine.  So with the help of a local we were able to work our way through the jungle find the site of the house… Nothing was left except for the concrete foundations of the place, some really large ants, and lots and lots of mosquitos – we are in the “jungle” afterall.  Someone also spotted an alligator in the shower room.)