The wedding is done. On to the honeymoon!! We had a hard time deciding on a destination. Our trip would be limited to paltry two weeks as there was a job to get back to. It would also have a heavier focus on simply doing nothing than is typical for us. You know those travellers who are up at the crack of dawn and who will happily walk all day while getting to every museum, historical site and market in town in a matter of days? Yeah, that's us. But not this trip.
Japan and Vietnam were both discussed as possible destinations. The problem with both of those places is that they're places where we want to spend serious time. We're emotionally attached to the idea of really getting to grips with both Japan and Vietnam. We've previously spent a week in Japan and that was agonisingly short.
And then inspiration struck. What we needed was a destination that neither of wanted to go to. We didn't want one that we were actively negative about. We just needed a destination that we had no emotional attachment to. Somewhere where we didn't have a lengthy list of things we absolutely had to do. Somewhere that we probably knew nothing about. After a brief search for places we knew little or nothing about that were reasonably accessible from Western Australia we had our honeymoon destination. Malaysian Borneo.
The Malaysian portion of Borneo consists of two states. Sabah with its capital city Kota Kinabalu in the north. Sarawak with its capital city Kuching in the south. There are a number of resorts clustered around Kota Kinabalu that will provide us with time to do nothing. Then after a few days of leisure on to exploring the rest!
We flew from Perth to Kuala Lumpur then on to Kota Kinabalu. We arrived at Perth airport super early. We were keen to be on our way so we rushed to the airport, rushed to check in then rushed to sit in the departure lounge. We wound up with a lot of time to fill. Quite a few hours in fact. We opted to fill that time with junk food.
When it finally came time to board we received a very pleasant surprise. When we checked in we had mentioned it was our honeymoon. The very kind staff at Malaysia Airlines had upgraded us to business class for the Perth to Kuala Lumpur leg of our trip! Thank you very much Malaysia Airlines 🙂
Although we are avid fans of cheap accommodation, as this is our honeymoon, we decided to splash out. As such when we arrived in KK we were delivered to the very grand Shangri La Tanjung Aru resort.
We opted for Tanjung Aru's honeymoon package. This included a room as big as our apartment including a bathtub full of rose petals, champagne in our room, free drinks every afternoon in the lounge (all you can drink), followed by free cake (all you can eat) which largely made the included dinners unnecessary although of course we made room.
We both put on an amazing amount of weight in only a few days. Living on cake and champagne isn't great for you however it is our honeymoon after all.
Our time at Shangri La Tanjung Aru has been wonderful. Its cost us a lot more than we would usually be willing to pay however this is a once in a lifetime experience so what the hell?! Plus Tanya harvested a goodie bag from the room containing 1-2 kilos of l'occitane products. She's just making sure we're getting our money's worth.
