SE Asia - Round 2

The time has finally come! Yolsens revisit SE Asia, +3 since our last trip. 

 The original plan was to travel around for a year with our future children as we met a few families doing just that. Then we had kids and realized they don't really take well to us homeschooling them. So we trimmed down to a 9 week trip and are hitting the highlights. 

 At 14, 12 and 10 we feel we are in the sweet spot where everyone can be a fully participatory traveller but don't yet have obligations that would make a 9 week trip difficult. Isla was still indulged with a roller bag instead of a travel backpack but I'm not convinced that's necessarily age related. 

 With kids we are doing it a little different this time. 

1. We have booked all of our accomodation in advance rather than the three days McGill was covering last time 2. All of the accomodation has a private toilet (quite the upgrade!) 

3. In Malaysia, we have rented a car rather than waiting for public transit. It's less aggressive driving and better signed than Colombia but they drive on the left so there are a lot of random windshield wiper flicks. The lane widths are however wide the space is so sometimes it feels like our relatively large SUV will both hit oncoming traffic and fall off the edge of the road. 

After an 8h layover in Tokyo where we ate sushi and ramen and enjoyed their high tech toilets, we landed in Kuala Lumpur at 6 am local time. We picked up a car rental and drove up to Cameron Highlands where we wandered the tea plantations, hiked up to the mossy forest and became acclimatized.  From there we made our way to George Town, stopping at a huge cave outside of Ipoh on the way.  In George Town the heat and humidity got real.  We were thrilled to swim in a free pool that felt like it was cooled, it was perfect after a walk at the botanical gardens.  

We love eating and love our tropical fruit so took a tour of a tropical fruit farm.  They advertised themselves like a museum, think Noah’s Ark but fruit trees.  They had some unique offerings that we ate off the tree including a “miracle fruit” - eat it first and the next fruit tastes sweet rather than sour.  Lily loved picking the tiny buds off these cacti, and we were all flummoxed that dragon fruit grows at the end of a cactus.  It makes sense given how it tastes but I suppose we had never thought about it before.