Summer Update

It’s been a while. I guess that’s normal when a Type A organises a bonding family holiday.

I supposed it’s also normal for a Type A-organised multi-country bonding holiday to end in disaster.

Mooloolaba Beach, early morning

This particular disaster struck in the form of a gout attack.

For weeks I gorged myself on Australian cheese and knocked back bottles of New Zealand Sauvingnon Blanc like nobody’s business.

Over the same time period, Darling Man, health nut that he is, indulged in two glasses of red wine, a square of cheese and two beef burgers.

Guess which one of us ended up with gout? Hint: it wasn’t me.

And so after three gloriously chilly weeks in Australia, doing exotic things like being cold, walking dogs on the beach, roasting things in an oven, using a dishwasher and driving a car, we found ourselves in a hostel in Singapore utterly exhausted.

Darling Man was in pain, with a swollen wrist that was responding painfully slowly to the gout medication we picked up in Australia. I was in a zombie state, the result of chasing Sunny up and down a plane for eight hours in the dark IN THE DAYTIME. And everything was just awful.

The relaxing part of the holiday was over and we weren’t relaxed and we weren’t bonded. In fact, we had been bickering for a couple of days, all of us. In a hostel with hip young things listening through the wall.

The fun part of the holiday was supposed to start the following day with a very long train journey through Malaysia. None of us were in the mood for it, and buying train tickets online wasn’t as easy as I’d expected. Some change had been introduced two weeks earlier, which made all my research out-of-date.

Darling Man said he wanted to go home. He knew how to get the right gout medicine in Vietnam, he said. And he just wanted to rest, not chase kids around.

But I’d pre-booked our accommodation.

We decided to split up for a few weeks.

Miss M said she wanted to go home with her dad. And within hours I was embarking on a solo-parent backpacking trip through Malaysia, with 18-month-old Sunny in tow.

It was AWESOME.

Sunny and I at a tea plantation in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands.

And now I’m very behind on the blog. Hopefully more words and pics will come soon.

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.