ok, actually emailed on December 17, and also after a few cocktails…

Hello everybody, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are gearing up for a fantastic Christmas!  My apologies for being incommunicado lately… every waking minute with my computer has been focused on vacation planning.  Lemme tell ya, when every click takes 5 minutes to respond, and mysterious “disconnection” and “quota exceeded” errors pop up each day to contend with, planning a vacation to — where? anywhere! — can be a tall order.  This one took me two months.

But finally all the tickets were ordered, and all the hotels connected by train, plane, or boat, and vacation we are now on.  Southeast Asia was the call… and not because we don’t want to see more of Africa, but because Asia was on our must-see list first.  And living in the eastern hemisphere has its advantages.

And so, 6 days ago we arrived in Singapore, then traveled up the coast via train to Kuala Lumpur, then further north via train and ferry to the island of Penang, where we now sit in the historic Eastern & Oriental Hotel sipping cocktails in the same bar where Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad once sat.  (Though I imagined they scribbled their musings on napkins or notebooks rather than an iPad.)

Kuala Lumpur has been our favorite so far.  The tallest twin towers in the world were right outside our hotel room window!

Tomorrow we are heading to Langkawi, a Malaysian island just south of the Thai border.  Krabi, Phuket, Bangkok and Chiang Mai are in our future, then we’ll be back on African soil January 7.  We’re both wishing we could be with family for the holidays — originally our plans were to spend the holidays with Seb’s new niece in British Columbia, and most of my family is together in Florida this year — but wishing even more that Apple hurries up that app for human cloning.  A Christmas miracle!

Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy New Year.

Love,
Jen
Sent from my iPad