Facts and FAQs About Our Trip: South East Asia Edition!

We're home! We made it back home after the most amazing three month adventure! We are quite sad that it is over as we really enjoyed all the places we got to explore. We're very grateful to have had such a wonderful opportunity to travel the world again! We've started sorting through our pictures and will have some more posts of places we went, once we get settled back in at work again. But first, a short facts and faq post about our trip! If there's any questions you have that we didn't answer, feel free to comment or email us and we'll be happy to. Thanks for coming along for the ride with us! 

Where did we visit?

We visited 7 countries: Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Maldives, Cambodia and Hong Kong. 

We stayed in 22 places: Legazpi, Donsol, Banaue, Batad, Coron, El Nido, Sabang, Kota Kinabalu, Mt Kinabalu, Sandakan, Kinabatangan, Ubud, Amed, Labuan Bajo, Kanawa Island, Yogyakarta, Singapore, Male, Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville, Siem Reap, Hong Kong.

What was your favourite place?
For our favourite place, we both really liked the Philippines. We were there for a month and saw everything from whale sharks to rice terraces to ship wrecks under the ocean. It was beautiful everywhere and the people were so happy and extremely nice. It was great, we'd highly recommend it as a place to visit sometime, and it has something for everyone!

We both agree that our favourite activity was the scuba diving. We took to it like ducks to water! We ended up doing quite alot, but I think we'd have been happy to do even more if we could have! We dove in 5 of the 7 countries we visited, and I think we both enjoyed the Maldives the most (it was strictly a diving visit), and Coron in the Philippines second best which was the first place we dove and where we got to see all the wrecks.

How long were we gone? 
We left Sunday March 30th, and returned home Thursday July 3rd. For a total of 96 days!

Where did we stay?
In total we had 95 nights:
69 nights in hotels or guesthouses
8 nights on boats
4 nights on island camps with Tao
1 nights in unheated dorms on Mt Kinabalu
3 nights in an AirBnb room
3 nights in a hut on Kanawa Island - 1 with cockroaches
2 nights in a shared hut in the jungle of Borneo
2 nights in a freezing cold bus
2 nights on planes crossing the Pacific Ocean
1 night in a traditional Ifugao hut in the Philippines

10 nights were spent sleeping outside with only a roof and a mosquito net
25 nights were spent with no air conditioning

How many currencies did we use? 
We used 8 currencies during our trip. Philippine Peso, Malaysian Ringgit, Indonesian Rupiah, Singapore Dollar, Maldivian Ruffiyaa, Cambodian Riel and US dollars were used in Cambodia also. The most fun one was the Indonesian Rupiah which has an exchange rate of about 10 000 to 1, so you get to carry millions with you!

Some other fun facts:

18 - Number of flights we took
8 - Unesco World Heritage Sites we visited
3 - Days stranded in Labjuan Bajo by the eruption of the Sangiang Api in Indonesia

35 - Number of days we spent at least an hour swimming in an ocean
69 - Number of Dives we did
61 hours - Number of hours we spent underwater scuba diving
10 - Shipwrecks we dove in and around
3 - Bodies of water we dove in - South China Sea, Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand

20 - Number of different islands we visited
8 hours -  How long we were stranded on a deserted island

32lbs - How much weight we lost in total on the trip!
21 lbs - How much heavier our bags got by the end of the trip

7 - Types of sharks we dove with!
4 - Number of Komodo Dragons we saw
2 - Number of whale sharks we got to swim with

17.5 hours - Time spent actually climbing and descending Mt. Kinabalu
8454 ft - How high we climbed at Mt. Kinabalu

3 - Number of holes in one Laura got at Angkor Wat Mini Putt! (Jerome won overall though)
14 - Number of paper and audiobooks we finished
115 - Cryptograms Laura solved on the trip