And that, folks, is a wrap

Just shy of a year now and it's time at last to head home, having put 80,000-plus kilometres under our belts - thanks to 15 flights, 20 buses, 10 cars, 26 boats, seven horses, one submarine, one truck, three trains, two subways, three trams ... and seven countries.

If (or when, as some optimistically insist) I get my book published, I’ll check back in and bring you up to date. Until then, thanks so much for logging on to www.travellinmama.blogspot.com – the positive vibes have helped keep me going, for sure.

It’s been a massively good time, punctuated by just enough mini-disasters to keep us giggling years from now. On that note, I count myself lucky that the only all-out screaming match I had with my husband had to do with a parenting decision about a certain boat on a certain beach on a certain island in Malaysia – where a certain precious lifejacket-less daughter was allowed to go out frolicking in the sea with a MALE STRANGER who drove the boat for a dodgy parasailing outfit. It all turned out fine, but still. You can guess who let her go and who wasn’t there at the time to veto the decision.

I’m under no illusion that the kids will remember everything or even anything specifically about our year away but I’m counting on the subconscious to inspire them later in life. Specifically, what they saw of genuine poverty – by walking the streets of a certain town in Lesotho, say, or by giving some of their own money to a twisted dwarf beggar in Malaysia – will hopefully have provided the building blocks for empathy, as my earlier travels have done for me.

What I really hoped to do was to teach them that there’s a whole world out there beyond their small-town safety net, and I know I succeeded in that. With everything they’ve experienced and seen with their own eyes, I’ll never regret taking them out of school and enrolling them in the school of real life.

There were plenty of doubting Thomases, particularly when it came time for us to take them to Africa. In fact well-meaning folks could hardly believe we would dare take our girls there at all. To them, I would still say that going after what we want doesn’t make us bad or selfish parents. It actually makes us happier people, and therefore better parents. And as far as Africa itself is concerned, Angelina Jolie isn’t the only western mom to fall in love, completely and utterly, with the place.

What I take away from it all is the conviction that we’ve done the right thing, had an absolute ball, spent a wee bit too much of our nest egg and will return home in a few days’ time a closer family than ever.

Hopefully I’ll catch you all at the book launch in Toronto one day. Wishful thinking, indeed, but what the hell....

Travellin' sea urchins

Snorkelling in the South China Sea, anyone? I never would have thought it could rival Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for colour and sheer gorgeousness, but it does. In fact, it was the best underwater experience I've ever had. And while I’d like to say we stayed in these glorious chalets on stilts (top pic) I can't fib because for a cool grand a night, it somehow didn’t fit the budget.

Market day

We are all amateurs when it comes to sampling Asian food but the girls, much braver than I, have found a thing or two at this market that's to their liking. Doog thinks I am a total peasant but I fear if I venture back into the local stuff I will be puking yet again from the back of a ferry. Pathetic, yes. Safe? You bet.

Island girls

Hours spent lapping up the sun and sea is doing wonders for the mind and body: think jet skis and paddle boats and sand and surf and pools and room service and Scrabble on lounge chairs and that’s us for the past eight nights. Heaven!!!!!!!!!!
Our room on this Langkawi Island resort in northern Malaysia is so darn nice the girls don’t always want to leave ... but when they’re not playing Singapore Airlines flight attendants in their new duds or tempting our resident monkey down from his perch, they’re down here at the beach.

Lapping it up in the Jewel of the Orient

Skanky squat toilets one day, lap of luxury the next!

We have been upgraded, inexplicably to Penang’s glorious Eastern & Oriental Hotel - once the elegant colonial watering hole of Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling and the like. Preserving the glory of a bygone era, this place offers unimaginable luxury, impeccably mannered butlers and basically anything you could want. I wish my beloved late grandmother Gigi could see us now. She absolutely belongs here, and she so would have loved it.

PS Did I say I was ready for this holiday to end, what the puking and all? I take it back.

Poor me, no?

At the risk of sounding all poor-me and everything, I can't help but be a little fixated on this nightmare Kuala Lumpur-to-Penang train thing (even though it looks not half bad in this picture) because not only did all four of us puke within 24 hours of leaving this train, but I had to puke over the back deck of an overcrowded ferry, surrounded by dozens of burkha-clad Saudi women peeking out at me in amusement from behind their jet-black veils. (There’s not much I hate more than puking but I must really add public puking to my litany of things to strenuously avoid.)

Holiday, holiday, are you almost over?!!

I'm too old for this shit

Whose dumb idea was this train anyway? OK, mine, mine, mine. Next time I should listen to those in the know...
We are en route from Kuala Lumpur to Penang, known as the Jewel of the Orient, but believe me, this ain’t no luxurious Orient Express judging by the smell of the shitty hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-train toilet just a few feet from where the girls are standing. And yeah, it may look like they're are having fun but I AM NOT!! Because travelling long distances by train in the third world? It’s all coming back to me now! The endless bag carrying in the absence of trollies (and we have about a dozen bags to lug back to Canada), the to-ing and fro-ing, the waiting and the sweating, the standing in line, the Asian squat toilet where instead of a flush there is a nasty HOSE which you must try to use while also trying not to lurch your way INTO the toilet on a moving train. This is hard to do when you are plugging your nose with one hand and trying not to actually TOUCH the hose with our other.

And yeah, having our own little sleeper car seems fun and adventurous but in reality it’s a stinking, clanging, crashing, screeching, overnight stop-and-go nightmare from which I may never recover. Plus the smell of hundreds of people's poop is all mixed in with the gross herb-smelling cigarettes that everyone smokes.

Is it possible that the holiday that never ends is trying to tell me something?