Phuket Island in 3 Days (Day 2)

PHUKET, THAILAND 20 - 23 June 2009
DAY 2

Today is one of the highlights of the trip i.e. Phi Phi Island and everyone is in high spirit! It is very sweet of the ladies to wake up early and prepare breakfast for us and that’s what I called blissfulness. After breakfast, we drive down to the jetty at Au Chalong or Chalong pier. The drive from the hotel to the pier took around 45mins if you know the exact way, otherwise, perhaps 1hr. Usually tour operators would provide pick up service but of course, it is chargeable depending on which side of the island you are staying in. Unfortunately, places like JW Marriott, Marriott Mai Khao and Sheraton commands the highest pick up fees due to its location in the north, which can cost each person up to THB600! Not only that, you are the first to be picked up (Earliest) followed by many others in different locations AND you are the last to be sent back to the hotel, resulting in lots of time wasted in picking/sending others from/to their hotel.

Yours truly behind the wheels.

[Tips 01: Quick calculation – 7 pax x THB600 = THB4,200! That is worth > 2 days rental of our Toyota 3.0CC Fortuner!]

Phuket Island in 3 Days (Day 1)

PHUKET, THAILAND 20 – 23 June 2009

At last, it has been so long since the trip. Finally I've got time to blog about this trip and here goes.

DAY 1
We boarded AirAsia from Singapore Changi T1 air terminal towards Phuket International Airport. There is only one minor hiccup for the flight. One Caucasian jumped our queue and act like nothing wrong about that. My wife was fuming mad and was like mumbling throughout the check in time. Apart from that, all’s well.

We reached Phuket airport around +1400hr and proceeded to meet up with Jeff and Jane (We have earlier made arrangement to meet at Burger Kings).

[Tips 01: There are Burger Kings, Subway, Dunkin’ doughnuts and some other stuffs at the airport but their prices are not cheap cheap… if you know what I mean]

[Tips 02: There are moneychangers both inside and outside the airport but the one inside is not accessible once you have stepped out of the main entrance. No sweat, the one outside offers pretty good rates too]

Tanjong Beach, Sentosa Island

Well, it is nice once in a while to head to the beach and this time round we had an appointment with Brian and guys to bring our furkids to Tanjong Beach Sentosa for a swim and chill out session! The weather is great on that day! Brian picked us up to head to Sentosa together but wonder what went wrong, he thought we are heading to East Coast instead of Sentosa despite Lynn (Faith ma) called to ask where in Tanjong Beach are we all meeting...

Business Continuity Management (BCM)

One of my colleague Mr. B will be ending his employment with the company that I am working in tomorrow and thus, one of his portfolio i.e. the BCM was being passed on to me. After passing all the documents both softcopy and hardcopy + briefing, he pass the "equipment" required to carry out the BCM task to me. The items are surgery masks, gloves and a termometer. This termometer is pretty interesting as it does not requires any contact to determine your body temperature. All it needs is to point the laser on the forehead and "bam" you've got your temperature! Pretty neat huh? Anyway, to give you a better idea, I have uploaded the photo of the gadget as shown below.

Preparation for Phuket Island in 3 Days

20 – 23 June 2009

This has been a long awaited trip and much time has been invested to plan for it. There will be a total of 7 persons involved in the trip i.e. William + Jeannie, Jeff + Jane, Pooi See & Dana + yours truly. I have undertook the role of coordinator so in this posting, you will get pretty much of the things that I had gone through and areas that you may want to take note of with plenty of tips along the way.

I have broken down the trip into a few sections as follow:

i) Accommodation;
ii) Transportation/ Logistics;
iii) Program;
iv) Meal; &
v) Budget.

Kuching: Borneo in 3 Days (Day 3)

Day 3

OK, I know, the postings are kinda slow. Despite having being instructed to be in self-quarantine, I still have not come up with any posting. Anyway, I will have to buck up as there are more things happening that I had blogged about, so here is the continuation of the Kuching trip.

Like I said, many people who came from Kuching quipped that there is nothing to do in Kuching but to eat, which I begged to differ. Our trip is so short we could only do a few things hahaha! We missed out on Bako national park and the Borneo heights but managed to go to a few places for the fun of it. Anyway, the tour packages are cut-throat so we decided to ask one of our local friend, Mr. Jackson (Not the recently deceased) to drive us to the places that we would like to go. Itinerary for the trip is i) watching orang utans, ii) visit crocodile farm, iii) cultural village.

[Tips 01: Drive on your own if possible, tour packages is a killer]

Here are some photos during the excursion, which unfortunately is not well taken, oh heck!

Kuching: Borneo in 3 Days (Day1 and 2)

Day 1 and 2

Ahh Kuching, the feline city of East Malaysia... I guess that is how they got the name Felicity. The first time I've been to this place was a couple of years back for a short trip with my wife. The initial impression of Kuching is very much biased, no thanks to the media, that it is "Ulu" (Guess what? The word Ulu is really the name of one of the many native tribes in Sarawak and they lived very very deep in the forest) but I guess the media owes me and especially the Felinese an apology for portraying or seemed to suggest that they still lives up on the trees. Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, which in turn is one of the States in Malaysia. The predominant population in this area is made up of the many native tribes, malay, chinese, indian (I don't see many though) and other minorities and please note that the population demographic scale does not come in that order.

The "Orang Ulu" house @ Cultural village

Picnic in ECP

30th May 2009

Dana and I was planning for a BBQ on the East Coast Park on this date so that we could have a get together with friends and loved ones. The initial idea was to set up camp and have Barbies at the same time but I am reluctant to spent the $$$ to buy the tent, which may be costly and that being said, something we don't use as often. So it is really not worth the investment. I managed to convince Dana so we will just have BBQ. So off I go to book the BBQ Pit (You have to book the BBQ pit or get the permit for BYOPS in Singapore!) at the AXS machine at Toa Payoh Central. Oh the horror! It is school holiday period and it is not easy to locate any pit on any dates! It was full house! Dismayed, I called my with and told her that I could not booked a pit at all even changing location to Pasir Ris or Changi Park does not helped... So I quickly suggested "Why don't we just have a picnic?" (Eureka! I am a genius!).

On the 29th night, we went to NTUC Extra in Ang Mo Kio hub to get the ingredients we needed for the picnic i.e. bread, hams, greens, cheese and the likes. I especially enjoyed doing groceries. I love seeing the merchandise on display and the fact that all these are available within my grasp. These are also the little things that brought joy and colors to life. The total amount of the groceries came up to around S$60+ and I told one of the picnikers, Jeannie, that it will be a "subway" standard sandwich.

First Family Outing in ECP

23 May 2009

This will be the very first time our family (Dana, Bon Bon and I) had a family outing together and the venue we have chosen is East Coast Park. The idea was really a last minute conjuration as Dana has been lamenting that weekends are boring and yada yada yada. We kinda explored what we could do and stuffs E.g. a short trip to Bintan/Batam or maybe a 3D2N island trip and the likes. After checking the internet for lodgins and all, we realised that it is too time consuming to go places that are far and also costly (we have a trip to East Malaysia around the corner i.e. 24-26th May 2009 and nother trip from 20-23 June to Phuket).

We did called Dana's cousin, Brian (DogLover) and asked what is his plan for Saturday. He mentioned something about bringing his furkids DoMo for swimming but disclaimed that it might be early in the morning and further counter-disclaimed that the plan might not happened as he is tired and likely not to be able to wake up early... Can you make up your mind already? So I just told Dana to not count on that and added "Why don't we just settle for East Coast Park and at the same time can bring Bon Bon for a swim?". Dana seemed to like the idea, so ECP is the place on saturday! [Come to think of it, I have never brought my wife to East Coast Park to Pak Toh before :p]

The Coat and All

Bon Bon, like all Pomeranians, has double layer of coat. One is the long, straight, glistening and harsh outer coat which is easily visible when one sets his/her eyes on a Pom. The other is the under coat which is the short coat that kept the Poms warm as well as functioning as a layer of protection from liquid penetrating their body. These under coats are abundant on the shoulder and chest area, giving the Poms manes. Well, these info will come handy in the later part of this posting. ;-)

Having Bon Bon back 3 days after the break-away was truly a heart-warming period but it also beckons us to make some adjustments and actions. I have just set up a physical barrier on the front door yesterday to prevent Bon Bon from trying to sneak out of the house again, but this of course will cause all of us the inconvenience of having to remember to step across the barrier every time we needed to go out and my instinct told me that within the next few days, someone would tripped and break the barrier which also means that I have to re-build the barrier as much as it might inconvenient us.