Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, Lombok & Singapore!

I was born on a small island in Asia, but there are far too many Asian cultures to count! (Although I’m sure someone has tried.)

We never planned to visit Asia when we left for The Azores, but things changed over the years!

When we were able to leave living in Europe to travel through eastern and southern Africa for 3-4 months (our rationale was “When else in life can you travel Africa with your kids for so long?!?”), it completely changed our plans.

Arriving in Bangkok, Thailand, from Sri Lanka. TIP: Get a luggage cart and put your tired young child on top of the luggage…fun for them and much easier for keeping track of them when you inevitably go through the crowded sections of Asian airport.

Suddenly, with no need to stay in the European time zone for work, we were able to go ANYWHERE.

And I’ll tell you…around this time (exhausting nonstop travel after living relaxed in Europe, and throw in a cold Scottish Highland spring season that made me think of NZ beaches) we started yearning for one of our Home Countries. We’ve been to nearly 100 countries and while there are several frontrunner favorites of ours, there are still just two standouts that eek out the others as feeling truly like home — one is the United States and the other is New Zealand.

They both feel like capital h Home.

Our daughters have never been to New Zealand (although technically my first has! we moved from New Zealand to California to be close to my grandma right before my first daughter was born), so suddenly Jess zeroed in on New Zealand as the new destination.

After we left mainland Africa for Madagascar and Mauritius, we hit Asia via India and Sri Lanka. This was all planned in combination with

places we wanted to visit
timing
between airports with nonstop flights 😉 (We don’t do layovers! If we arrive in your airport, we are staying in your country!)

Singapore is a major place for flights to Auckland, and we found a creative way to get from Bangkok, Thailand, to Singapore via Vietnam (we had our Christmas in Vietnam!), Bali and Lombok (the last two are separate islands in Indonesia).

I’ll share our favorite experiences from each of these 5 places! (Bali we visited twice — a remote northern coast and then later the more touristy south central area.)

THAILAND

Bangkok doesn’t have Uber; they have “Grab.” (Tip: download this onto your phone before you arrive! or while you wait for your luggage, like I did 😉 but we have an international phone plan and you might be stuck without Wifi.)

Traveling with your young children: lots of THIS in vehicles! Note she still loves her pants **from India.**

It’s difficult to pick just ONE favorite thing we did in Bangkok.

Was it the wild tuk tuk rides through the city?

The food? (We’re mango connoisseurs and had THE BEST FRESH + DRIED MANGO in Bangkok that we’ve had EVER. Like, indescribably the best…and we thought we’d had it good before…)

The Grand Palace?

We got a peek at restorations & cleaning.

The gold detail on what felt like miles of wall like this was my favorite…the artwork on this was just chef’s kiss.

Visiting little shops? (Frozen fruits, sorbets and ice creams, an adorable dress for one daughter, dried mangos as future supplies, and I couldn’t resist the hats for the girls the reason for which you’ll see further below…)

Riding boats and ferries on the river?

There’s far too much in Bangkok for just a few days, and this was one of the few places where we actually didn’t have time to spend weeks or months…

One day, walking around a little shopping area, I bartered with a woman for these woven hats for the girls…they reminded me SO much of hats I’d see Okinawan gardeners wearing when I was a kid…💛

The area we stayed in was next to these canals…

And we saw AN ALLIGATOR in the canal (the day after this photo was taken)…:)

VIETNAM

Nothing says “Christmastime” in Vietnam like rice fields…

…visiting a real Vietnamese home (yes, I was 100% checking out how they used their kitchen!)…

…and even a Vietnamese monastery?

One of the monks approached us and spoke in lovely English, asking us all kinds of questions about where we were from…

Nothing like being a kid, just running full-out through a monastery garden in Vietnam with no one scolding you for it…

Other favorite experiences in Vietnam were going to a very non-touristy market (most of it was daily household stuff, like thousands of dishes and cooking-type supplies and lots of daily clothes)…one daughter did find a Vietnamese fan she liked and my other daughter and I thought THIS was the most fascinating thing we saw:

We also enjoyed this cute Vietnamese cafe with iced coffees and coconuts…

Last but not least, I have to include this visit to a rubber plantation because I’ve always wanted to see how this was done! 🙂

BALI (NORTH & sOUTH)

Bali Part 1: North!

Hands down THE BEST PLACE IN BALI was up north!

It was quiet. It was remote. I think we saw a few other tourists sitting at a table at a far distance when we came back from our scuba diving trip…

Otherwise it was just us, our scuba diving guys (one of them went with Matt and I to show us the best spots, and the other awesome guy swam next to the girls as they snorkeled above us so that we wouldn’t have to worry about them and just ENJOY where we were, which we did! to me, this compared to our diving in Great Barrier Reef!)…

You could look up and see this on our way to our first dive site…

We scuba’d at the sites until the sun went down, using every moment before we had to be back in the harbor…

The view behind us and before us…

BALI (NORTH & sOUTH)

Bali Part 1: South Central!

It’s just plain fun to write “South Central” for a place like Bali. 😉

We took advantage of being in a more populated, tourist-focused area to do some more fun things and — while we’ve ATVd and rafted in too many places to count — we did NOT expect Bali to top our charts in both!

Probably because the ATV guys, after seeing Matt and I knew how to drive ATVs, let our daughters drive in some super-muddy areas where we got SOAKED by rainwater and mud…and loved it! 🙂 (Our clothes are still stained…)

We also experienced 1 of the 2 the most gorgeous rafting trips we’ve ever been on (the other is in New Zealand) outside of Ubud, but all those pics are on our GoPro and I haven’t downloaded them so you’ll just have to wait. 😉

LOMBOK

We sailed from the remote northwestern coast of Bali down to the southeast, but enroute we stopped at a completely different Indonesian island to the east of Bali — Lombok!

Ahead of time, we’d set up hiring some genuinely nice guys who drove us around, all the while educating us on Lombok culture and way of life (and especially the courtship-marriage-wedding process since that was the age these guys were at and so I think it was front of mind for them 🙂 ) and took us out on a boat snorkeling on various islands for the day…had a fresh fish + Lombok-style lunch…it was SO relaxed!

Riding on the roof of the boat was one of the highlights for our daughters! 🙂

Riding on the roof towards one of the tiny islands we snorkeled from.

SINGAPORE

Oh man, Singapore really is a whole other world…

We ended up renting our own car as it was actually less expensive than getting taxis, so there’s a tip for ya. 😉

Everything there is to do feels so man-made, so maybe you’ll like that and maybe you won’t…

Our favorite thing we did in Singapore was the “Gardens by the Bay”!

It was massive!

So much to do and you’ll have to pay to get into each section (you can pick and choose, or get combos of some)…

Our favorites were the Supertree Grove and the Cloud Forest (#1)!

Although if you’re looking for a 100% free option, we recommend the splash pad and park nearby. It was lush and creative for play! (And not heinously expensive like everything else in Singapore.)

A popular thing to do is to kill time in the Singpore Airport and its connected “malls”…

You might have seen video clips of this waterfall “from the sky” in the Changi airport…the whole place is Massive (with the intentionally-placed capital M).

Really, we were just killing time before getting on our plane (and into our beloved Skycouches 😉 another tip for those of you with kids!) to New Zealand!