Asia for 10 weeks!

The idea about a trip to Asia came from the place we had met.. We wanted to go back to Asia, not to Thailand yet tho. We have this massive map on our wall (actually two maps..) and on this dark and cold November night we decided that we wanna go! The length of the trip was first three months, then it dropped to two months because of our work and the rent we obviously would have to pay from the empty apartment.. When booking the tickets to Kuala Lumpur we become a bit creedy and added and an extra two weeks.. So all in all ten weeks! 

We opened up our travel account to which we saved around 300 € / head / each month. We searched about airBnb but decided not to do that.. We carefully asked our landlady about if one of my friends could come and live here while we were in Asia.. She basically said yes.. I started posting on different webpages and told my friends about that our place would be free to rent for almost three months. Couple of young girls were interested in moving to Helsinki for the summer. They couldnt promise anything so we decided to forget them and move on. So many weird people contacted me! For example a Russian family of five people..! This weird woman that I searched from Facebook that had some hooks on her skin and was hanging from the ceiling! :D All the emails were so annoyingly written like no phone numbers, no "best regards" or anything.. 

I think in around January I got an email from this couple and it stood out a lot! It was so nicely written saying that almost on the exact dates they were gonna have pipe repair thing on their apartment block and they had to move out.. They were so nice and friendly so I knew that was it! They were willing to pay the whole rent! OUR SAVING !! They came to see the place and Steve was at work so mom came here with me. We agreed the renting on a piece of paper which I printed from the internet. SO nice and honest couple, could NOT have asked anything better. I knew instantly that our place would be "safe" and kept well. We only removed some papers from the house and left everything else here. When we got our place rented we saved over 2000€! That woulda been a massive lump to save extra just to get the rent paid!!

The shit thing is that I had written all the money stuff up on my phone... and.. it exploded in Singapore! 

We spent around 2500€ together without flights to KL and back! So not that bad at all I don't think! So basically everything included for the 10 week trip from the two of us costs us less than 3500€!

The dates that we went were from 27.4 to 3.7! The spring went really fast when we had to work and I had to finish off the ringette season so that I could actually go on a holiday that long. From the gym I just arranged all my clients that they knew I was going and did programs for them in advance to which they would change at certain point. 

We didn't plan that much! I'm usually really good at planning trips and organizing stuff but I struggled! I felt like it was too long of the trip to plan. We read here and there and had a rough plan which changed on the way many times just because lack of time and that we hadn't considered distances that much. What looked like a short trip on the map could easily have taken hours and hours because of the poor condition of the roads! 

We had to get a visa to Indonesia which we wanted to take in advance. We went to the embassy and they denied it because we didn't have an arriving date to the country. That was so annoying cause we hadn't wanted to put any time for ourselves when we were gonna swap from Malaysia to Indonesia and which point we would go to Singapore.. Originally we had also planned to go to Philippines but that we decided to forget in quite early state because of money and all the hassle. We went to to actually see the countries properly not just a glimpse of places.

Here starts the story writing almost two years later.. Thank god we wrote a journal! :P