2016 Travels

We stayed at Armarndo's Airbnb stay 🏠 and it was PERFECT! He completely undersold this place which was in a great location, around the corner from Piazza Navona and Piazza Fiori! Armando was so helpful and I would recommend this accomodation to anyone on a city break to Rome.

On our first day in Rome we hopped straight to it and visited Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Del Popolo. We also made it to the Spanish Steps to find that they were closed, no thanks to Bvlgari!!😣

We later found out that a few of the famous Rome landmarks and attractions have recently been closed off due to luxury fashion designers funding a restoration or clean up of the site in order to promote their fashion brand. Tods shoe designer recently cleaned the Colosseum which cost them 25 million Euros 💵.

We booked onto a tour of the Roman Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Roman Forum. Although it was good to have a guided tour we did feel that our time in the colosseum was a bit rushed and Steve would have liked to have taken more photos.

On that note, Steve's photo count is at 1,824! We're going to have fun selecting the ones to put into this year's holiday photo book... (which has become a yearly tradition now 😊). Who's turn is it this year Steve??? 😉

We also visited the Vatican Museums and THANKFULLY hopped, skipped and jumped right past the 2 hour long queue to get in! "neh neh 😆" couldn't help but feel smug that we booked online in advance. Later in the afternoon we climbed to the top of St Peter's cupola (dome) for great views across the city.

It's got to the point that I don't know what day of the week it is any more, I just count the number of nights I have in a city and be mindful that we have a train or a plane to catch! 😍 #earlyretirementOkumaya devam et

Too soon the time came when we had to leave Lankayan Island 😣. (Kicking & screaming) we returned to the mainland by speed boat and caught our flight to Kuching ✈.

The next morning we were picked up by our guide and we ventured to Bako National Park, notable for its incredible biodiversity. Our guide was Alex, a very enthusiastic individual and he clearly had a love for nature 🐛.

We arrived at Bako via boat ride and waded onto the shore barefoot where we were greeted by Macaques on the beach foraging for flowers. As we progressed inland, other animals emerged such as more probosis monkeys, bearded pigs, silver leaf monkeys and a green pit viper.

Alex took us on an unexpected and very sweaty jungle hike. This led us to a sandstone plateau where the search for various species of carnivorous plants began.

Throughout the plateau we found pitcher plants of varying sizes. These ranged from the size of your little finger to ones as large as a water bottle! The plants lie waiting for an unsuspecting creature to venture a little too close to its edge, fall in and inevitably get digested alive by the juices within.

Along the trail we came across a small snake lying on the path. Unsure what type of snake it was, Alex asked us what colour it was. We bent down to take a closer look and replied "redish brown". Flicking through his personalised snake book he was not 100% certain on the species and we moved on...

At the jetty awaiting to leave Bako we got talking to another guide who excitedly told Alex that he had seen 4 species of snake today 😄. We wondered if we could trump his snake sightings with ours. We showed him the photo of the one we saw and he confirmed it was a Coral Snake! He exclaimed that we had just seen one of the most deadly snakes in the world, 2nd to the black mamba found in India! I still can't believe we were casually looking at it so closely! 😰

Apologies for the lack of blog photos at this point, my phone has deleted photos 😕. But don't worry, Steve's on his 2nd memory card 🙈👍.Okumaya devam et