Matt & Kat

All of the monopoly game place names come from London and every time we walk past another one here I get a small buzz. Silly? Perhaps – but still kinda fun 😛 Yesterday we went shopping along Oxford St, Bond St and Regent, we walked along Pall Mall and had lunch in Trafalgar Square before catching a movie in Leicester Square and taking the tube via Piccadilly to get back to our hotel.

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Why does everyone complain about London so much? We’ve had a great time here over the last three days and we’re looking forward to finishing off our holiday tomorrow before leaving for Dublin on Sunday. The highlight of London for me was definitely going to see to The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majestys Theatre in Haymarket (right next door to New Zealand House!) last night. First thing yesterday morning we went along to Leicester Square, where there is a booth that sells last minute theatre tickets and picked up two cheap tickets for some excellent seats.

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Really nothing to write home about. Neither Kat or I found any aspect of the city that appealed to us, or would entice us to want to go back there. I think it suffers from over promising and under delivering, especially having just come from Singapore, which is definitely an example of a beautiful city. We’re now in London (despite a 2.5hr delay leaving Dubai while Emirates tried to fix the plane we were flying on) and are just about to go down and have some breakfast before starting our first day in Europe.

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We were in Singapore from April 13th – 15th and had a chance to look around the city, do some shopping and catch up with some cousins of mine who live there. Here are the highlights of what we did during our stay: Singapore by night: On our first night in Singapore we had dinner with my cousin Elian and her husband Teng Huat. We ate some great Thai food and then walked through the city to the waterfront.

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The day after returning from the Mulu Caves (Thu 5th), we found ourselves at Miri airport again, this time bound for the tourist mecca of Kota Kinabalu. Kota Kinabalu, named after the famous Mt. Kinabalu (the highest peak in Southeast Asia), is north of Miri, in the state of Sabah. Kat’s Uncle Louis and Alfred came with us on this trip, and Kat’s uncle generously booked us all into the Sutera Pacific resort, part of the magnificent Sutera complex (5 star), which appears very similar to something like Golf Harbour in New Zealand.

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We have just come back from two days away at the Royal Mulu Resort, just a 30 minute flight from Miri and set in the middle of the rainforest. Mulu is a world heritage site famous for its caves. There are something like 60 caves in the area but only 4 are accessible to the general public to walk through. On the first day we walked through the rainforest to get to two caves: Lang Cave and Deer Cave.

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The adventure has begun… and is off to a fairly sedate and uninteresting start. The Emirates flights from Auckland to Brisbane, and Brisbane to Singapore, were completely full, with no spare seats anywhere in the plane. I’m not sure if my memories of emirates were better than reality, or whether Air NZ’s new economy class clabins have set my standards too high, but one way or the other Emirates only gets a 5 out of 10 for me for comfort and convenience based on the trip so far.

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