Category: Asia

Posts about places in Asia

Eastern Indonesia Highlights

Indonesia has been an adventure. After two years in New Zealand and Australia, it’s been a fun change visiting a new country where we don’t speak the language. And sprawling Indonesia offers new cultures and languages, or at least dialects, on almost every island. From Darwin, Australia we travelled to Kupang, on the island of Timor. Indonesia is a very big country, and we’ve only visited a small section. While traveling from Timor to Lombok, we encountered amazing animals, met friendly people, and ate delicious food, all part of our Eastern Indonesia highlights.

Our Route in Eastern Indonesia

Unlike our excellent sailing conditions in North and Far North Queensland, we had no wind after Darwin. We motored for the 4 days to Kupang and then for the almost 700 miles from Kupang to Lombok. When the wind wasn’t on our nose, it didn’t last, so we motored the whole way. All of our trips, aside from the first jump upon leaving Kupang, were day trips. We only sailed overnight from Kupang to Sagu Bay because we had no choice, as it was too far to do in daylight.

Calm sea Indonesia
The sea and winds were calm on our “sail” from Darwin to Indonesia
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A Week in Singapore

We’ve spent over a year in Australia, and are looking ahead to our next cruising destinations. Yet, we still have a lot of ground to travel in Australia to set ourselves up for that next jump. Once we got to Townsville, we decided to take a trip out of the country to reset our visas. We looked at flights from Townsville and chose to spend a week in Singapore.

Singapore Visa Run

This is not our first time making a visa run, leaving a country for a short time to extend our stay. To extend our Australian visa, we left our boat in the Townsville marina, as we did for last year’s visit to North America, and hopped a plane for Singapore.

Why We Chose Singapore

We explored all the international places we could fly to from Townsville. All options take several hours and two flights (from Townsville and then Brisbane). Even flying to Auckland was a 6 hour journey, plus we’ve already been there and it’s winter. We’ve had enough of winter. Singapore was close, warm, and a new destination. So we booked it.

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Our Tokyo Adventure

We arrived in Tokyo at the break of dawn after two flights and a layover, a long day. After taking the train into the city, we dropped our bags at a hotel (not our hotel, but close enough), and started exploring. Our Tokyo adventure began with a free walking tour and continued with lots of fun in Japan’s sprawling capital city. Our introduction to Japan, Tokyo is overwhelming and enchanting and we loved it.

About Tokyo

Tokyo is so big that all the neighborhoods are their own cities. It is massive, both physically and population-wise. In fact, Tokyo has the largest population of any city, with 37 million people. I have lived in big cities, including NYC, and Tokyo still overwhelmed me. It’s bigger and busier and electric. The good news is, it is very safe. If we got lost, we found help, and if we lost something, it was returned to us.

Overview of Our Tokyo Adventure

We had five days and nights for Tokyo, and we did a lot but also barely scraped the surface. Since we planned it so last minute while waiting on our boat insurance, we didn’t book any of the big attractions in advance. Our Toyko adventure was more about experiencing the city.

Free Walking Tour

We arrived in Japan early in the morning, so after dropping off our luggage and fueling up with much needed coffee, we took a free walking tour. The three hour tour hit a couple of neighborhoods, including Akihabara and Ueno Park. Still, the guide gave us some great tips and we got some exercise after our long trip from Australia.

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