Singapore - first two days

At the start of this year I raised an idea with Ri, let's leave the country for Christmas,  we've never left the country for Christmas before! His Nan's birthday was just before Christmas, so we would usually stay in Brisbane, especially after the kids were born. Nan, sadly, passed away at the tender age of 100 last year (we've missed her a lot this year). So before everything went so wrong for us this year, before our new home flooded, before we needed to live in an airbnb for 3 months, before my RA/liver went out of control, before two contracts on our house failed. I booked a two week holiday to Singapore and Hong Kong. AND I AM SO GLAD THAT I DID.

photo from booking.com

We left on the 13th and arrived on the 14th of December. Our flight left at 11:35pm and I honestly ended up wishing that the flight had been longer. By the time we had our first meal and switched off the lights that only left 4 hours to sleep before they switched the morning meal lights on.
We arrived in Singapore drunk from sleep deprivation - I'd slept for about half during an iron man movie, and Ri had had a blanket over his head for about 2 hours. We arrived at our hotel - W hotel Sentosa Cove, at around 6am, check in wasn't until 3pm, but they were sure they'd get us early check in. They offered us coffee and we followed the offer into their breakfast area, which had access to the pool. So after breakfast we went into the pool area... about fifteen minutes later (because our togs were somewhere between the door to the hotel and the room and there was no guarantee that if Ri left the pool area to try and find said togs, that he'd be able to get back in again without a swipe card) we just got into the pool in the clothes that we'd been wearing on the plane. It was an effective way to wake up. In interesting move in a dress.
We were able to get our hands on our key at around 10:30am, so we headed up to get our room sorted and then decided to stay awake by going for a walk around Sentosa Cove, we found a place called big fat mama's - we ate here at least three times. We spent the afternoon zombiefied by the pool. We ended up ordering room service and curled up in bed by 7pm.

On our first full day in Singapore we ventured to resort world to visit the aquarium, which was very impressive. I liked how they had education stations pushing the 3 r's, reduce, reuse, recycle plastics. The kids found some fish stamps and put one of their fists, Immi held out her fist to Arch saying "fish bump!"

When asked Immi reports her favourite animal was the jelly fish and Arch says the lobster. We had lunch at Slappy Cakes, which we'd been to before on Maui.
After lunch we made our way to the rainbow candy store. After the kids went mental in the candy store, which is where we bought their stuffed merlion that they named Reece's pieces, we decided it was time to leave Sentosa. We hoped on the monorail to vivocity and then tried our hand at the MRT, after staring at the map for a minute I confidently said to Ri "we need to get on the circle line" Ri asked "in which direction" I replied "we're at the end of the end" Ri: "wait... what?" (Singapore we need to discuss the definition of 'Circle'.) We managed to get on the wrong circle train, so we decided to abandon ship at the botanical gardens (just in time for the rains). We waited out the rain at the gardens,received some great advice on where to grab dinner from a guy who worked at the gardens. After the rains we checked out the children's garden then went straight back to the MRT to try again. Our destination was satay club lau pa sat. We managed to get on and off the right trains, but crossing a main road in Singapore city - you need to either go over the road, under the road or walk a mile to a crossing. The food at Lau Pa Sat was soooo good. We were a bit conservative in our selections when we we on our own...

New blog

Write every day. Is the advice I have been given during an academic writing class.
I'm currently chasing my PhD part time, while working part time, raising two kids and dealing with 30+ years of rheumatoid arthritis drama. This next blog is just going to be whatever is on my mind that night...

https://wordfindingdifficulties.blogspot.com.au/

New Caledonia

So it is almost a year since of cruise, I can't sleep due to dramas relating to the recent purchase of a new home. So here I am, I am going to conclude the tale of our most recent overseas trip, and promise myself that next time (December, when we head to Singapore and Hong Kong), I am going to blog as we go. Why do I lie to myself so often?

Hop on Hop off bus

 I highly recommend getting tickets for the hop on/hop off bus. It took us to all the places we wanted to see and I don't remember having to wait very long for a bus to arrive, each time we rocked up to a bus stop a bus was just around the corner.

Markets!

Second breakfast of champions

The first stop we made was to the markets for some after breakfast pastries, which were delicious. We look at the markets. Marvelled at the extremely expensive hats (I think there was a $60-$70 hat Imogen has her eye on.) I think we ended up distracted her with a slinky or bouncy ball. 

The entrance to the aquarium

The second stop was to the aquarium, which really impressed me, so such a small little place, they had a lovely selection of sea creatures including on of these:

The nautilus 

 I hadn't seen a nautilus before. Fossil records indicate that nautiloids have not evolved much during the last 500 million years. Nautiluses are much closer to the first cephalopods that appeared about 500 million years ago than the early modern cephalopods that appeared maybe 100 million years later (ammonoids and coleoids). They have a seemingly simple brain, not the large complex brains of octopus, cuttlefish and squid, and had long been assumed to lack intelligence. But the cephalopod nervous system is quite different from that of other animals, and recent experiments have shown not only memory, but a changing response to the same event over time.

In a study in 2008, a group of nautiluses (N. pompilius) were given food as a bright blue light flashed until they began to associate the light with food, extending their tentacles every time the blue light was flashed. The blue light was again flashed without the food 3 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours later. The nautiluses continued to respond excitedly to the blue light for up to 30 minutes after the experiment. An hour later they showed no reaction to the blue light. However, between 6 and 12 hours after the training, they again responded to the blue light, but more tentatively. The researchers concluded that nautiluses had memory capabilities similar to the "short-term" and "long-term memories" of the more advanced cephalopods, despite having different brain structures.^[17][18][19] However the long-term memory capability of nautiluses was much shorter than that of other cephalopods. The nautiluses completely forgot the earlier training 24 hours later, in contrast to octopuses, for example, which can remember conditioning for weeks afterwards. However, this may be simply the result of the conditioning procedure being suboptimal for sustaining long-term memories in nautiluses. Nevertheless, the study showed that scientists had previously underestimated the memory capabilities of nautiluses. (Wikipedia). 

Glow in the dark

 I wasn't a big fan of the glow in the dark, dark room. We managed to enter at the same time as a group of school kids, and it was noisy. Our kids started to have a bit of a freak out. So we left and came back when it was quieter. It was quite pretty.

Don't eat here

 The worst part about cruising is that at each given destination you are under a time crunch and unfortunately in Noumea the place we went to for lunch LA BARCA decided that our time wasn't really that valuable. An hour after we'd ordered that hadn't even started to cook the kids meals (which were like hotdogs or chicken nuggets, they would have taken minutes to cook) the worst part was the waiter kept coming passed, at LA BARCA, and telling us that our food was "five minutes" away. So like chumps we waited. In the end we left, after paying for our drinks but refusing to pay for the food that was "on its way to the table" - yeah right.

AVOID

 So after the complete bust that was LA BARCA we had crepes at a place near the dock. They were devine, the salted caramel was so good. 10/10 would recommend.


So that's our adventure at sea. Our next holiday is going to be on land. But I'm glad our friends convinced us to go on this adventure, and I think I wouldn't mind going with them next year. If we can.

x T

Fiji

The waterfall

 I'm going to start by saying that the people that we met in Fiji were so lovely. One of my patients at work last year had been from Suva, and I was excited to see where they had come from. We disembarked at the port of Suva to an amazing band, that really created a party atmosphere. We decided to stick together (the eight of us) in Fiji. Stubbornly refusing to take a carnival cruise tour, we had a quick look to see what the locals were offering. It all seemed to focus around this waterfall. So after waiting for our bus in the blazing sun, we were on our way to the waterfall with a 'tour', which would include a lookout and a local village stop on the way.
Oh the tour was bad. We were in a minibus and we stopped three times, the first stop was at the top of the hill, looking back at our cruise ship. I think Chloe was the only one to get out of the bus to get a photo. The next stop was at a random house, our 'local village' stop. We were literally just sitting in a minibus outside of someones home, and we weren't really allowed out of the bus/there was no one there expecting us. So awkward.
Finally (after our guide pointed out the prison and Mormon church) we made it to the top of the waterfall. The guide thought I WAS GOING TO STAY IN THE BUS. While my family went down for a swim. Oh I am such a little hot head. While everyone around me were discussing the best way down I said *oh F*ck it* and picked the closest track and started my way down.

It was half way down the steps of slippery death, as I imagined how difficult it would to be removed from this scene in a stretcher that TLCs wise words finally made sense... don't go chasing waterfalls.

The waterfall

It wasn't the easiest thing, getting down all the "stairs" that were covered in wet leaves. But I am stubborn. To a fault. And just took it one step at a time. And hey, I didn't die.

Imogen and I at the waterfall :) I'm not waiting in the bus

 What blows my mind is that two older ladies from our cruise chose NOT to climb down to the waterfall, the highlight of our dodgie tour. Why not just stay in Suva?

ice cream

 After our "tour" we were dropped back into the middle of Suva, where we did some shopping. Arch bolted from me, when Ri went to put something away in a store. Arch ran in the opposite direction to Ri. Oh it was just about the scariest thing. I thought I was about to lose my boy in Fiji.

Shopping at the markets 

Immy got her hair braided by the locals

watching the band as we were leaving 

I am obsessed with collecting books while we travel

Would I go back to Fiji? Probably. I've seen photos from friends who have holidayed at the resort side of the island and those holidays look ah-mazing. 

Bora BORA

Bora Bora was our second and final destination that required a tender to get ashore.
To be honest after the beautiful day we had in Moorea, Bora Bora got off to a rocky start, it was raining. And windy. And cold.

tender

On this day, I had expressed to Ri that I needed to be near nice clean facilities. So we decided to get a day pass to the intercontinental, which had been so amazing in Moorea.

It wasn't as nice as the one in Moorea, the staff at the desk were unpleasant and it didn't have the same beautiful coral reef or dolphins or turtles. We did some snorkelling, but it was much colder than it was in Moorea (because of the wind).

The staff inside were lovely, our pass included access to the beach and lunch, but one member of staff brought us out some pastries from the breakfast buffet, for the kids. He also got us some extra towels for the kids when he noticed Arch was cold. Super nice.

We spent a bit of time on the beach, reading, building a sandcastle and running around the beach.
The lunch was nice, the best part was not having to hunt around for somewhere to eat, it didn't take a large chuck of our day from us. It was just relaxing and yummy.

Lunch with my little man

We checked out the beach across the road from the hotel and it was nice, but a lot busier. We didn't really have time to get into the water and have a good snorkel.

The other beach

My least favourite part of cruising was the short days that we had on shore, we had to be back at the boat by 3:30pm. And I think we tendered at 9am. We might go on other cruise, but if we don't, that would be the reason. Everything else about it was great. I'd recommend at least trying it once.

Before boarding the tender we found a shave ice place and had a sneaky shave ice while we waited to be herded onto the penultimate tender.

Shave ice on Bora Bora 

Moorea

We had to use one of the little tender boats to get to Moorea, of the five places that we went to, this one was my favourite and I hope to get back there one day for a week, so we can better explore the island.
The shape of the island reminded me of a dino-foot print. (Sometimes it's those weird small details that you want to remember, so excuse me for slipping that in. Or blurting it out, that's probably a better description of that sentence.)

We started our day by hiring a car, the car hire was right next to the intercontinental, which had a dolphin centre and a turtle rehabilitation section. We went up to the dolphin centre with the plan of just seeing some dolphins, but when we read the guidelines, they allowed children as young as 2 to swim with the dolphins (as long as they were held by a parent/common sense - don't take it your child if you know they will hurt the animal or freak out).
We were so excited by this. At one of our local theme parks, that has dolphins (Sea world) only children 9 and older can swim with the dolphins. I understand why they would have this age limit.
But I also appreciated the chance to let my small ones swim with dolphins.
The people at the dolphin centre were so lovely, they helped us get a time slot that ensured that we would be back in time to catch one of the last tenders for the ship, although I don't think I would have been that sad to be left behind. The staff were amazing to us, and we weren't even guests at their hotel, we made that very clear. But they still treated us like we were important to them.
Stuck on this gorgeous island.
But we did have Bora Bora coming up next, and I still thought that it would be even better (wrong).   And I would have definitely been devastated to not finish out the holiday with Erin et al. They had decided to do a boat tour that day. But that was something I loved about travelling with them. We did things together and we did things apart, but always came back together for dinner.
Love those guys.
Ok so once we had our dolphin appointment time provided for us, we went for a drive on the western side of the island. Found a cute place to have lunch, called the Plantation. We had the entire place to ourselves (and wifi... woot woot). The price for the internet our a carnival cruise is just insane. So I'd gone on a social media diet. And I was dying to know if my friend had had her baby yet (no news). I posted a few photos and we ordered a couple of vegetarian pasta dishes. They took a while to cook, but the result was oh so good. The waitress/owner told us they it was cooked outside over a fire, well whatever they did. It was GOOD.

lunch

We were early back to the dolphin centre so we spent sometime looking at the turtles that were being rehabilitated. They were so beautiful.

I think words are going to fail me, when I try to explain what it was like to swim with the dolphins. You don't realise how powerful these animals are. The trainer had a kiss the dolphins and when I was staring Koa (the dolphin) straight in the eyes, down past his body, I was acutely aware of how strong and big he was. We gave him pats, saw him do some flips, and the trainer did a great job of engaging the kids and explaining dolphin anatomy and physiology to them.
We took away the video, to help the kids consolidate the memory.
But even if they forget it (Arch will).
I will remember this experience for the rest of my life. It was magic.

Our two year old eagerly waiting to swim with a dolphin

After swimming with Koa, we went for a ten minute drive to the east side of the island (within the third claw of the dinosaur print) and did some snorkelling. Beautiful. Unfortunately the kids were not quite into snorkelling, but I think they will be in a year or two, and I can't wait to share an experience like the one I had on Moorea with them.
 

Me snorkelling

This isn't my image, its from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs97xAbUtPM but it best sums up what I saw

swimming

Paradise