Little India, Singapore

Hi everyone. Sorry its been so long since we've blogged. I had work trips to the USA (Boston, Durham, and Charleston), Australia (Cairns), and Finland (Helsinki), which have gotten in the way of family exploration. These were good trips, but most of my time was spent in conference rooms and airplanes, so I don't have very good photos to share.

During one of my weekends home, we did go exploring in Little India, which is actually just a couple of blocks from our house. Here are a few photos from that jaunt.

Borneo

We took advantage of some cheap airfare to take a quick weekend trip to Kuching, in the Sarawak region of Borneo. We stayed in an interesting treehouse in the rainforest, just a few meters from the ocean. Highlights of the trip included a longboat trip through the harbor, a tour of the Sarawak cultural museum, and a hike in the rainforest. During our short trip we saw a staggering amount of wildlife including proboscis monkeys and long-tailed macaques and enumerable lizards, turtles, spiders, crabs, etc. The rainforest hike was particularly interesting, culminating when we unexpectedly came upon a large waterfall.

Pulau Ubin

Interesting weekend. First, I lost a battle with a ceiling fan (Erin prefers a story where I got attacked by a wild monkey, but the reality doesn't live up to her fiction). Then, after a quick trip to the doctor for some stitches, we hopped on a bumboat for Pulau Ubin (http://www.wildsingapore.com/ubin/index.html), a small island 10-minutes north of Singapore. Ubin contains a small town with bicycle rental shops, a couple of restaurants, a lot of fisherman, and not much else. We rented bikes and sweated our way around the island, catching sight of 4-foot high hornets nests, spiders the size of the kids' hands, large monkeys, banyan trees, and some crazy fish/eel type thing (still haven't figure out what they were). We came back Sunday, dirty and tired. We were running late so we had to take the taxi straight from the ferry terminal to Graham's soccer practice, backpacks and all. We finally made it back to our shophouse at around 5 PM, completely exhausted.

PS - For my camping friends, though hanging one's food in a "bear bag" is clearly a challenge, keeping it safe from the monkeys seems like a much greater intellectual feat. I'm still not sure I have a foolproof strategy.