Two months on the road

It has been two months since we managed to get ourselves onto a plane Singapore-bound. We've spent most of that time traipsing around peninsular Malaysia. From time to time we've managed to post some pictures or tell a story about some of the beautiful places we've seen. Occasionally we even post a little video that Doug slaves over – anyone who remembers my old blog knows that I can't edit video to save my life.

Naturally posts haven't kept up with adventures, so you'll be seeing much here that's of a retrospective nature. Aside from that, lately I've been lamenting that we've lost the personal aspects of the dreaming track, somewhere in all the gorgeous beaches, rainforests, monkeys and mosques. There's not much in our recent posts that can totally reassure you that we have not been possessed by touristically inclined robot intelligences. If we still have regular readers (I'm pretty sure there are at least a couple!) then I can imagine you saying “Where's the human interest?!” and “Who are these people again?” or maybe “This is a bit like Aunt Beryl's slide show nights” and so on and so forth.

With this in mind, I thought I had better write a post about what the last two months have felt like and what's “the haps” from here with these two dreaming track kids on a personal level...

Mostly it feels like we've only just begun. Just under half of our two months was spent in Kota Bharu, impatiently waiting for the bank to get its act together and send us some stuff in the mail. There's something about waiting 3.5 weeks for a multinational institution to figure out how to send a package that gets on ones nerves just a fraction. Not that hanging out in Kota Bharu was bad, it worked out pretty cheap and gave us a chance to put our heads together and try to answer some questions about what we are actually doing that are kinda important. I guess the reason we haven't posted about our plans is that we simply don't have any that might not change dramatically tomorrow, or next week.

We've been to a lot of wonderful places already but they're just a tiny proportion of the ones we want to visit, a fraction of what we intend to do. A lot of the time we are in awe of what we are seeing or blissed out about how lucky we are to be, say, cooling ourselves at a rainforest stream under the shade of ancient ferns, instead of engaging in a multitude of other, less appealing activities. A great deal of the time we are musing upon the fabulous food in our bellies or sliding over our tastebuds. Sometimes we feel tired or worried, because travelling long term is challenging as much as leisure. Sometimes I miss my Mitten kitten (who is getting proxy cuddles from my mum) and sometimes I berate myself for not being more responsible and attending to a career or some other thing that virtuous and upright citizens do. Then I berate myself for being so idiotic, and laugh at myself as I look out over the mist-covered mountain-top tea plantations. There's no doubt that it's a thrill to be here.

There's a very small element of culture shock. As I write this there is a large Indian man peeing in plain sight in the lovely highland garden out the front of the hotel. He obviously doesn't mind who is watching but I have to search for something in the opposite direction to lock my eyes on. There are very few hassles in Malaysia – no frantic touts like I've experienced elsewhere, but heavily accented English can flummox us as easily as a foreign language at times and simple transactions can get complicated. I worked really hard on getting basic Malaysian down before we left and Doug had a head-start with his Indonesian, but almost everyone here prefers to speak English.

Travelling with Doug is fantastic. There's simply no substitute for great company. He makes me laugh and he's a veritable fountain of knowledge. He's always got my back and I couldn't ask for a better partner. I feel incredibly lucky to be here, but I feel luckier to be here with him.

Of course, we know that eventually we'll have to stop spending money and start earning some. Our dream is to base ourselves here in Malaysia and continue to explore the entire region, using our skills (Doug's photography and writing and my programming) to earn money, mostly via the internet. So many people have similar dreams and we have this sticky awareness that many fail to achieve them. Still, if we limited ourselves to totally feasible, easily achievable dreams, what a dull lot we'd be. We're working on making it happen and we'd be hypocrites (as well as extremely disappointed in ourselves) if we wussed out and didn't give it our best shot. Next week we are going house-hunting in Ipoh as the first step towards solidifying our plans. Soon, we'll be making some additions to the dreaming track – a site to sell Doug's photos as prints and another one to put my website skills up for grabs. We'll cross our fingers and put our all into it, because our dreams are worth it.

Meanwhile, sometime in the next month we are off to Thailand, so no matter what, there are many more adventures to come. I can't wait to get Doug to Bangkok, I hope he'll like it as much as I do. We'll be stopping at the southern Thai beaches of course, and there's still the Malaysian west coast to see! Mmm, Penang noodles. I'm going to make a serious effort to include more personal entries and some “talky” video, to put the Doug and Amber back into the dreaming track. More than anything, I want to live our dreams to prove it can be done. Then one day I hope to see everyone I love living their dreams too.