After a year on the road, it’s hard to believe that our travels have wound to an end. The final few weeks of our trip took us from Borneo, to Bali and then to Sydney before boarding our 19th and final flight of the trip back home to Wellington. This is the story of our last few weeks..
Sunset from a Kota Kinabalu (KK) market in Borneo
We made an excursion to the popular Sapi Island, just off the coast of KK.
Liam was very popular with these tourists from China and spent a lot of time playing on his racing car track with them. When they found out his birth date is 8/8/8, he was even more popular!
Monitor lizards on Sapi Island
We flew from KK to Bali and spent the first couple of days at the grotty Kuta Beach. Kuta is a party spot for Ozzies and the beach was covered in litter and was in a terrible condition. It was completely not our scene, but we did enjoy the food at the Fat Chow restaurant which was phenomenally good!
When Iris is responsible for organising accommodation, this is what happens!:
We hired a driver and went to see some of the sites around the western side of the island. This is the Tanah Lot temple…
Wave jumping was fun..
…But it was the butterfly house that was the undisputed highlight of the da
See if you can spot all three insects in this photo..
Just amazing camouflage!
The rice terraces were beautiful
The Temple at Danau Buyan was our final stop
We hung out the next few days in the much more relaxed area of Sanur beach. We spent a lot of time just cycling around, doing yoga and eating well. Even the kiddies got in on the yoga action.
Then it was off to lovely Ubud where we were thrilled to be joined again by Kiley. You have to keep an eye on her as every now and then she randomly will do cool stuff like this…
Selfies in the pagoda
There were some excellent organic restaurants and cafes, yoga, and massages each day
Life was pretty tough, but we struggled through.
I enjoyed my early morning mountain bike rides around the stunning Ubud countryside
…and the kiddies loved the pool!
We hired a driver and went on an excursion north of Ubud to these rice terraces…
…and to the impressive ‘water temple’
Unfortunately, shortly after this we were close to an accident where a motorcycle crashed head on with a van that was overtaking us. The sound was horrific and we don’t know if he could have survived
Our thoughts remain with him and his family.
Construction workers near the volcano at Danau Batur
Liam with our driver, Made, in front of the Danau Batur volcano
The kiddies constructed their own bed for our last night in Bali
And after a brief overnight stoppover in KL, it was back down under…
It’s fair to say that Kiley didn’t really require a lot of arm twisting to get her to join us in Sydney…
We met up with our friend Emma at Palm beach
No visit to Sydney would be complete without a barbee on the beach!
We were lucky enough to hang out with our friend Lisa for a bit in Berowa as well
The kids enjoyed climbing on the rocks in the Bondi to Coogee coastal walk
And then after almost exactly a year on the road, we returned back to our favourite city, Wellington.
The feeling coming back home was quite surreal, but for both of us the strongest emotion was of pride – we did
We’re unsure how much of all of this Liam and Sofia will be able to remember, but are confident that they will always take with them the ‘feel’ of having experienced what they have on this trip. We’ll be converting this blog into a hard covered book which will have a permanent place on our coffee table as a reminder for all of us a
Thank you to our friends, both old and new that we met along the way, and family who we have shared our journey with over the last year. It was fantastic to see you all and thanks for making the trip so spec
To everyone who’s been reading this blog, we hope you’ve enjoyed it. We’ve certainly loved writing it. If anyone is thinking of travelling with kids, our advice for you is to just do it. The travelling itself is of course fantastic, as it is always is whatever way it is done. However, we’ve found that it was the time that we got to spend with the children and what we experienced together that have created the fondest memories for us.
