Maldives Honeymoon

We spent the last 5 days in Maldives for our honeymoon.

The Maldives form a group of atolls in the Indian Ocean about seven hundred kilometers from south-west of Sri Lanka. The twenty-six atolls exist out of 1,192 islets, but only 200 are inhabited by people.

We stayed at the Full Moon Resort and did lots of scuba diving, laying out on the beach, and soaking up the incredible landscape. Here are a few pictures. (Click the picture to see the full size view)

From front door of water bunglow

Pretty flowers with Kim in the background

Triggerfish we saw when snorkelling off the back of our room

Full Moon Resort Entrance

Me and Kim on the beachPicture of the water bungalows where we stayed

Scuba Diving in Miri

Kim and I did our first dives together in Miri. We did 3 dives and saw a lot of beautiful fish, coral, and plants.

Back in Miri as Mr and Mrs de Jong

Kim and I have been back in Miri for a couple of weeks now. We got our new rental car yesterday - Nissan X-Trail. Its brand new, has less than 100 miles on it, and is very nice. Here is a picture.

Kim is taking scuba lessons this week and will be certified on Sunday. We're excited since we'll be able to dive whenever we travel.
We're crossing our fingers that our air shipment gets delivered on Friday this week. The shipment includes most of Kim's clothes, our wedding gifts, and scuba gear we bought in Houston. Hopefully it arrives so we can use the scuba gear for dives this weekend.
Kim and I will likely go to KL next week (for seperate meetings) and are trying to take a long 3 or 4 day weekend somewhere like Phuket or Langkawi. This wil be our first trip! There will be plenty of pictures if we go somewhere ;-)

Scuba Certified

I've been taking scuba lessons the last two weekends and will be certified after I take the written final exam this week. Diving is great here in Miri. I can walk out my front door and be diving over coral reefs in less than 1-1/2 hours. Now I just need to buy some scuba gear.

Me and Kim

I realized that some of you might not have met Kim yet. Here is a picture of us while we were vacationing in Jamaica last year. Three weeks from today we'll be married!

Miri Town

I took a few pictures of "downtown" Miri while driving. If you've been checking this blog periodically you might think that Miri is some paradise since I've really only posted the picturesque views of the area. I often refer to the long flight over as a time machine back to 10 years ago with dot matrix printers, no drive throughs, mopeds everywhere, fastest available internet connection being 1 mb dsl, bottled water and soft drinks only sold as singles in grocery stores, etc.

View from the House Balcony

Here are a couple of pictures from the house balcony. As you can see, the ocean is in clear sight.
I'm sure Jaek will love playing fetch along the path between the houses.
Click the picture to see more details.

Miri Beach Pictures

I went to the beach this weekend (which is located just minutes away from my old home of The Marriott). This is definitely one of the advantages of being in Miri vs. KL - You wont find things like this in KL. The 3rd picture is of the food court where several different vendors offer differnt styles of food - drinking coconut milk straight from the coconut is very popular. The last picture is of the park that was filled with families with children. Click each picture to see the larger image.

Our house in Miri

Click the following link to see a map of where we live. Can you find our house? Scroll over the boxes to see descriptions. HINT: We live very close to the ocean!

Once you find our place, zoom out on the map to see where we live in Malaysia and where we are relative to rest of South East Asia.

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=4.448763&lon=114.037485&z=14&l=0&m=a&v=2

Moving on Saturday, March 8th

I move into the house tomorrow, Saturday, March 8th. Owner is leaving a coach, dining room table, queen size bed, and two tvs in the house until our furniture arrives. Furniture is scheduled to arrive March 25th and will take 3-5 days to clear customs and get delivered to the house. I just need to buy some pillows, linens, towels, and misc things for the house. I'm pretty excited to be moving out of the Marriott.