Author Archives: John Rose
This is a Local Stop!
Our hotel organised a free shuttle bus to the nearby temple, so we made avail of it. The local temple just so happened to be both a UNESCO Heritage Site and one of Indonesia’s true gems… Prambanan. We got on the bus and laughed as we were the only 2 people on it. The short […]
Well Two out of Three ain’t Bad!!
After 5 nights on Gili Air we were rewarded with a Level UP for our commitment. That Level Up was Gili Meno. According to Wikitravel, Gili Meno is the “Meat in the sandwich of the three Gili Islands”. Gili Meno, while fast becoming the new exclusive retreat island, is still the best of the three […]
Côte d’Amed!
Nous avons arrives à Amed avec la plages noire et le tempo clair. L’hotel il s’appelle…. Pardon me. Amed is crawling with so many French tourists that we forgot who we were. Let me try again… We arrived in Amed, with its black sandy beaches and calm tempo. Our Hotel was a room behind a […]
Just a small town girl…
So that is us leaving Kota Kinabalu and about to head to Perth, Australia. Or was it? Like in the TV detective show Colombo (Peter Falk RIP), there was “just one more thing…” We had one more country to visit. Our final Asian country would be Indonesia. The island of Bali is one of the […]
Weekly Photo Challenge: Zigzag
This weeks Photo Challenge was ZigZag. This was a tough one but inspiration eventually came… A tree growing in the Chi Lin Nunnery in Hong Kong is this week’s choice. This place is really awesome if you are ever in Hong Kong. It’s also fairly quiet as you have to travel to get here.
Washout!
On the way back to Kota Kinabalu we stopped outside the UNESCO World Heritage site of Mount Kinabalu (The highest mountain in the Crocker Range) We stayed at the side of the main road just down from the entrance to the mountain. We had flirted with scaling the 4095m summit but with torrential rain all […]
Talk With The Animals – Jungle Cruise
As we alluded to in an earlier post… We had signed up for a 3 Day 2 Night Jungle Safari with a local photographer named Mr Aji. At first glance he is just a normal guy with a jeep,but as the trip progressed he turned into a veritable Dr. Doolittle type, and was the best […]
Dial M for Monkey!!
Borneo is know for more than orang utans, it is also the home of the Proboscis Monkey. The Proboscis Monkey is distinguished by a red nose, which is rather like a clowns nose for the males. It also is significantly larger than normal monkeys with big bellies. In Sepilok there is one place to see […]
The King Of The Swingers
Sepilok is the home of the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center in Sabah, Borneo. This was another big item on our wish list while planning our trip back in London as Orangutans (Pongo Pygmaeus) have always fascinated us. To get here we had to take a 7 hour bus from Kota Kinabalu. The journey took us past […]
Islands in the stream…
So after Singapore it was a side shuffle back over to Malaysia, in particular Malaysian Borneo. We landed in Kota Kinabalu (KK). This is the largest city in, and gateway to, Sabah, Borneo. There’s no beaches worth talking about (we found out the hard way too!), but as a harbour city it was chock-full of […]
The Secret Life Of Arabia
Crossing the Bridge and walking due east of Little India you can’t but fail to notice a mosque to your left. This is the Sultan Mosque and it is the center piece of an area known as Kampong Glam or Arab Street – a middle eastern enclave in the heart of Singapore. This area was […]



