Our Trip Around the World – Halfway Update

Our first Balinese sunset. It did not disappoint!

Welcome to our 4th installment of our trip around the world updates. We are currently enjoying our last few days on the wonderful island of Bali in the coastal town of Sanur. In a couple of days we head down to Australia to spend two weeks visiting Sydney and Melbourne. A week ago, we finally passed the four-month mark on our trip, which means that we are now closer to ending the trip than to the beginning. After traveling for so long, it’s pretty amazing to us that we are only just halfway through.  Its been about seven weeks since our last update post, so it was high time for another one. Below are links to each update in case you’ve missed earlier ones.

Our Trip Around the World – Introduction
Our Trip Around the World – One Month Update
Our Trip Around the World – 2.5 Month Update
Our Trip Around the World – Halfway Update

In putting together the updated map of our travels, I realized that we didn’t move too much since our last update. Instead, we enjoyed spending 1-2 weeks at a time in each location; first hanging out with our good friends, the Sinton’s, in Krabi for two weeks; then doing activities like getting our PADI Openwater Certification in Koh Lanta, and our Advanced Open Water Certification on Gili Air island (near Bali in Indonesia). After our month-long stay in Chiang Mai, we didn’t think we would find another city with so many amazing vegetarian restaurants, but we were wrong; the one time small village of Ubud, Bali had even more great places to eat, and most of them were all within a five-minute walk of our guesthouse in the center of town.

Stormy Gili Air Island. It rained everyday.

A sample of Balinese food we enjoyed in Ubud Bali from Sopa Cafe.

As seen of the map, we started off in Krabi, Thailand, then went to Koh Lanta for about 10 days. The highlight there was definitely learning to scuba dive, but we also enjoyed cruising around the island on our rented scooter, eating delicious ice cream sandwiches, and walking down the beach to dinner. We then returned to Krabi for a few days, which we spent mainly in our hotel room, trying to figure out where and when we wanted to fly using our AA Explorer Award. After getting that straightened out, we took a mini bus to Phuket to catch the first of our flights on the newly booked award, taking Qatar Airlines down to Kuala Lumpur. After spending five quick nights there, it was on to Bali, then Gili Air a few days later, where we did some more scuba diving. We finally settled down for two whole weeks in Ubud, Bali, a really wonderful town.

Some updated stats from the first 4 months of our trip:

130 days traveling

22 locations visited

13 total flights, 19,175 miles flown

Another 2,000 miles spent on Buses, Trains, Boats, and Taxis

19 nights spent with awesome friends and family around the world (In Portland, Seattle, Seoul, Taipei and Kuala Lumpur)

2 nights spent in a treehouse 100+ feet above the jungle floor on our Gibbon Adventure

1 night spent on a train

84 total nights spent in 28 different hotels/guesthouses

24 nights spent in our apartment in Chiang Mai

And some random facts:

Two movies watched in movie theaters (Hunger Games and Girl)

20 rainy days out of 25 days in Bali (it’s monsoon season, we had no idea!)

Four paintings bought (one from Myanmar and three from Bali)

$28 dollars spent to send said paintings home

Malaysians love their malls! After the beach towns in Thailand we really enjoyed walking around the Kuala Lumpur malls and watching a movie.

We were also busy writing for the blog over the past six weeks, creating over 15 new posts, including our most popular post yet; The Art of Booking an International Award Ticket. While this post garnered all the attention, we really enjoyed reliving our fun time spent in Myanmar back in December with our series of nine posts on our adventures there. In case you missed them, we’ve added a page where we list all our posts in chronological trip order.