Travels with pre-schoolers in South-East Asia
I travelled a lot in my 20s. I hoisted my Kathmandu backpack over my shoulders all over Europe and through Egypt; then lived in London and travelled at least once a month. I loved wandering through countries and learning about their history, and observing how people live. When I had my first child, who is now almost five, I wanted to keep travelling – and so did my husband – so we’ve sought to make it a part of our family life.
For the past three years, we have persistently saved some money each fortnight, for the next adventure. We initially planned and booked a trip to Malaysia and Borneo in 2018, but we postponed that trip, after learning I was going to be 30-something weeks pregnant in a Borneo jungle. And nearly six years later with that baby about to turn five, we have made it. It hasn’t been the best-timed trip as I found out I will be made redundant in June, so we’ve had to plan more carefully what we do and stick to a budget.
I have found travelling with kids – our 2-year-old daughter O and 4 year-old son R, to be humbling, eye-opening, hilarious, stressful, and rage-inducing. All of the emotions. We spent 18 hours straight travelling to Singapore and parenting without a break (one of my longest parenting shifts ever?) which included getting the kids up at 4am NZ time, flying to Sydney, having a layover, and then flying to Singapore - arriving at our hotel at around 10.30pm NZ time that night. Trying to calm down my overtired 2-year-old enough to have a nap on the plane, proved exceptionally difficult. Did she nap? Yes, after about an hour of screaming. And I do mean full-on screaming – the kind that pierces your eardrums and has you apologising to all the people around you.
Somehow, I managed to avoid the looks of concern / annoyance from the other airplane passengers as I bounced her and up down on my shoulder, ignoring the pain of holding a 13 kg child for hours on end. She finally fell asleep on my shoulder and then miraculously curled her legs up on the chair for a couple of hours. Our four-year-old son R (who is about to start school in 2 weeks!) refused to nap, and watched movies for like six hours straight. I’d look over at him and he’d be lying across two chairs with headphones on, holding his eyes open with invisible sticks. At the end of the journey, I was very focused on getting off the plane with the kids and squaring away all their paraphernalia – felt tip pens, colouring books, tiny bits of lego that had got stuck in the seat, random airplane snacks – and several different people came up to me and CONGRATULATED ME on how well we had done on the flight. “You did so great! So did the kids!” I looked at them with incredulity – how could they think it had gone well? I still don’t know. I am baffled but grateful that people took the time to be kind to us when we had struggled through the two flights.
It has usually been the travelling days that have caused the most chaos. We went to Legoland in Johor and then caught a bus to Kuala Lumpur which was a three-and-a-half-hour journey. We had so many bags (with the addition of groceries and lego…) that four-year-old R had to push one of the 18kg suitcases on wheels. I was carrying O on my hip (she’s very attached to me, so I’m usually the one carrying her), a backpack, wheeling a 25kg suitcase and a tote swinging on my shoulder while trying to keep an eye on R who was about to lose the suitcase down a ramp, all while trying not to drown in my own perspiration. It is over 30 degrees each day and feels like 40 degrees given the humidity. We weaved over broken ground tiles and gutters where you could see a sewer running beneath, then incomprehensibly had to haul our suitcases through a restaurant … then a hasty side trip to a squat toilet, which R refused to pee in. We finally got to our bus. On the bus journey we would’ve liked to nap like the rest of the people on the bus, but the kids would not sit still. I had O bouncing around on my knees and then continuously looking at her brother and dad behind us while spilling half the contents of her lunchbox on the floor and in my lap.
Some of the highlights of travelling with kids have been the unexpected joy they get from the simple things we take for granted. We visited Thean Hou, a Chinese temple on a hilltop in Kuala Lumpur. The kids were not interested in the beautiful Buddha statues, they just wanted to fill little plastic bags with yellow daises as they saw other people throwing flowers into the water. They climbed over the Chinese zodiac statues in the garden, cackling over the rooster and the pig. When we ask the kids what they want to do in the morning, they always say “Pool! Poool! Mummy!” so every day I have been swimming and cooling off in clear waters surrounded by towering buildings, which I would not have done without them. And because these are my children, they love a good museum and anything to do with animals, either fake or real ones.
One of the best attractions we’ve seen was in Singapore where we spent the first five days of the trip. In the Art Science museum, there was a whole room filled with digital flowers that interacted with your footsteps as you walked over them, and grew vines as you moved. O and R coloured in flying creature pictures which we then fed into a scanner, and their pictures appeared on a wall: butterflies, planes and birds, that soared out of a volcano and flew around, joining other people’s drawings in 3D.
One of the things I liked about travelling in my twenties was getting small snippets of insights into how other people live their lives. It’s still possible to do that with children in tow. I’ve got the impression that people in Singapore and Malaysia have to work extremely hard. One morning O and I got in a Grab (taxi/ride service) to go and check out the Sultan Mosque in Singapore. The driver gave me a half hour spiel about how his son has finished a university degree but now wants to do another one in aerospace engineering (which I later learned is a big industry in Singapore). The driver was disappointed in his son’s apparent flakiness and had given him a 2 hour lecture the night before on the importance of working hard, applying himself – and not bringing ‘shame on the family’. The driver’s son was probably working himself to the point of burnout – and likely had from primary school. He had studied in a public school then had to do several hours of private tuition which cost thousands of dollars, just to get into a university. Then he had to work his way up at his workplace, which sounded cut-throat and nepotistic.
At the apartments we’re staying at in K.L, a helpful hotel clerk in his twenties has so far helped me work out how to get places including a medical centre that I had to take O to as she was wheezing at night with a cold. He has let slip that if he has to work until midnight, it’s very difficult to get home. He usually catches the train but if they’re not running, the only option is to walk. I’m guessing he doesn’t have the money for a Grab. I asked him how long it would take him to walk home and he said three and a half hours. Holy. Jesus. We’ve also experienced the fun of navigating K.L footpaths – there are so many traffic lights to wait for, traffic jams and side street warrens, that it can take three times as long as it should just to cross the road. The heat can make it impossible to walk during the day, which probably only adds to the traffic problems, as I’m not sure you could walk more than a couple of kilometres without getting heat stroke.
I can get quite anxious about the environment and the amount of waste we produce as travellers (as well as carbon miles, which I know aren’t great). I’m intrigued to see which countries still use single-use plastic bags and plastic takeout containers, and these are prevalent in Malaysia. I have dutifully put our plastic recycling in a bag next to the rubbish bin, crossing my fingers that they do recycle it. So far, the hotels have all had filtered water machines, which has meant less buying of bottled water and my associated guilt with that. Here, every square metre seems to be utilised by something. Space is taken up by buildings or roads in the cities, and between them, hundreds of kilometres of palm tree plantations (at least between Johor and K.L) for palm oil production. From one horizon to the next all I could see was palm trees. I couldn’t help but think of the lack of biodiversity and pollution of the soil and rivers.
Our next big stop is Malaysian-Borneo, where we’re going to *hopefully* see some orangutans. If my children allow it, I’ll write some more from there.
Sounds like an amazing and hard trip. While I would love to, your travel story hasn't encouraged me to take my children overseas anytime soon 😆