| September 2017 - China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka
If you missed my Tumblr updates, go here. For this year's big trip, I went to China, Malaysia and Sri Lanka, in that order. This was my first trip to China. I went to Sanya in Hainan. It's an island province and China's southern most point. I think Hainan can best be described as China's Hawaii. It also seems to be the place for weddings, or at least wedding photos. There were a LOT of wedding photos being taken. It was a daily occurrence. I stayed at Anantara in Sanya. It's a beautiful resort. Great staff. They upgraded my room because my luggage was late. (Not their fault.) I also got a complimentary massage out of it. The resort itself is on the beach. It's also bigger than I thought. There's a section with villas that I never made it to. They also have a few excursions. I did a bike tour which was really fun. Turns out I was the only one to sign up for it. It was just me and my guide, Milan, who spoke very little English. (Which was way more than the amount of Chinese I knew.) So she just gave her tour guide speech and pointed out things along the way. I would just smile, nod my head and take pictures. It worked out quite well actually. A few things I learned from my trip to Sanya. First, not all airports in China will check your bags all the way through to your final destination. From what I was told, three will. Hong Kong is one of the three. Changsha, the airport I was flying through to Sanya, does not. Second, Hainan airlines does not have a check-in counter in Changsha. You actually go to the Hunan counter to check your bag. They service Hainan and several other airlines (like 9). Third, almost anything Google doesn't work in China. It's all blocked. Tumblr doesn't work either. To get it to work, you need a VPN client. I recommend installing it before going to China. From Sanya, I flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The trip started ok. I arrived at the airport on time. The plane departed from the gate on schedule. The rest went downhill from there. The plane parked on the tarmac. The pilot said something about "congestion." We sat there for 2 hours. Long enough for me to miss my connecting flight in Guangzhou. This was a bit of an issue because in addition to having to reschedule my resort pickup, I was also meeting travel buddy kumi in Kuala Lumpur. She was waiting for me so we could take the car together to the resort. Luckily, through a combination of an AT&T hotspot (Guangzhou) and Vonage, I managed to get kumi picked up earlier and my pickup rescheduled. After airport drama, we finally made to Avani Sepang Goldcoast resort. It's a very nice resort. It's designed in the shape of a palm tree. The rooms are all over water. (We stayed in a Superior room.) There are several restaurants to eat at, (five I think) and plenty of activities to keep you occupied. In addition to several spa visits, we did a couple of day tours. One to Kuala Lumpur, and another to Malacca (Melaka). Both are good and I would recommend to anyone. We also wanted to do a river cruise, but it was fully booked. We had also planned to see the Sepang International Circuit (it's close by), but laziness kicked in, so that didn't happen. After spending 6 nights in Malaysia, we were off to Sri Lanka. The original plan was to spend 5 nights in Sri Lanka, but kumi thought we should stay longer to see and do more stuff. So we spent about 11 nights in Sri Lanka... We did a lot. kumi posted our itinerary on her Livejournal. We did do some slight changes here and there, but it gets the point across. The first stop we did in Sri Lanka was Bentota. We stayed at the Avani Bentota Resort and Spa. The entrance of which does not convey how really nice the resort is. 2 restaurants, 2 bars, 2 pools, (3 if you count the kiddie pool) and it's on the beach. We got a Deluxe room. (More pics here.) We were really happy with this room. (It's bigger than my first 1 bedroom apartment, 893 sq ft.) After settling in, we did some shopping, went to the beach bar, ate some lunch, kumi scheduled a foot massage, crashed a bit, then eventually ate dinner and slept. The next day we met our driver, Constantine Shavin. (I think he's part of a company, but we're still not clear on that.) He took us on our first tour. A river safari, which as it turns out, is only a 5 minute walk from the resort. I highly recommend getting a driver if you're planning on seeing multiple sites in Sri Lanka. It's convenient, you don't have to worry about getting from place to place, and in our case, some revisions Shavin had us make to our itinerary saved us a lot of time and frustration. Hiring a driver is so popular in Sri Lanka, that many of the hotels and resorts have separate lodgings for drivers. (They also get discounts at some restaurants.) Which makes it very nice and convenient when traveling from town to town. Turns out we had two drivers, Shavin and Nixon. Shavin was there for the initial part. Nixon was our driver for the remainder. As mentioned earlier, we went to a lot of places. For a more detailed commentary, see my Tumblr blog, or my Blogger blog (same commentary, less pictures). We stayed in Bentota for 4 nights. From Bentota, we went to Sigiriya and stayed about 3 nights in Sigiriya Jungles. (Another beautiful resort. We should have stayed there an extra day.) Then we went from Sigiriya to Kandy. We spent one night in Kandy at OZO. From Kandy we drove to Nuwara Eliya, where we caught the train to Ella. We stayed at the Ella Gap Panorama for one night in Ella. After Ella we returned to Colombo where we stayed at the Cinnamon Red Hotel until our departure. Things of note about this trip:
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