Travel day & arrival in Borneo!

Today was always pencilled in as a travel day with three flights booked to get us to Sandakan in Borneo via Kuala Lumpur. We were informed late last night that our third flight has been cancelled but the company we booked through had arranged an alternative flight for first thing the next morning at no extra cost and 100 euros for overnight accommodation.

So tonight we've landing in Kota Kinabalu on the west side of Borneo with a flight booked at 7am tomorrow over to the East Side of Borneo. Hopefully we'll just about make our tour which starts at 9am! We've made the most of our 100 euro budget and have landed a rather nice king suite in a hotel in the centre of town. All we've had time to do is grab some quick dinner and an early night ahead of our 4:30 wake up call!

Over the next few days we've got numerous tours booked in with a local company and hoping to see plenty of wildlife including turtles and orangutans. Initial views are that Malaysia appears to be more developed than Vietnam and weather wise is very similar, hot and sticky! Very excited to start exploring!

We had the most amazing first week in Vietnam, it was the perfect way to start our adventure.

Our learning's from a week in Vietnam!

• 28,000.00 Vietnamese Dong = £1 (we've been feeling like millionaires!)
• Cam on= thank you
• Tieng Chao (Sing tauw) = Hello
• 12 million inhabitants in HCM, 9 million motor bikes
• 8 million inhabitants in Hanoi, 6 million motor bikes
• "Sort of" communist
• Mainly Buddhist and Catholic
• Third biggest rice exporters in the world after China and Thailand
• Average income is £150 a month
• Each village have something they produce for the country- we visited the area that makes rice paper.
• 15,000 people lived in the cu chi tunnels at one time during the war. The maze of tunnels include toilets, kitchens and weapon armouries.
• The Vietnamese Wat was really a civil war and not a fight against the USA.
• Halong bay is a unesco world heritage site of 300+ islands
• Halong bay started to be formed in 570,000,000-500,000,000 BC. The islands are large limestone structures, many of which are hollow.
• Fighting in Vietnam began in 1945 with the Vietnamese fighting for their independence from the French.