the rainforest

I like to believe our honeymoon was different. Where, if there was a prong in the fork of choice - can you see it? Can you see the prong? Can you? - we'd veer left side, towards the deepest jungle and a few wild beaches, and others might veer to the right, where Mauritian and Maldivian package holidays (All alcohol inclusive!) await.

Hey, the all inclusive-booze thing would've been nice actually. Would've made it eight thousand times less expensive.
Nay. What we wanted was to choose our honeymoon, step-by-step. Custom-create that bad boy. A bespoke tailor-made journey - both luxurious and adventurous (read: rustic).

It was just glorious. Besides being able to spend time together, with not a stress in the world, (maybe one or two like, choice paralysis when faced with the cocktail menu, and things like whether we should go snorkelling today or tomorrow), the main thing was that we could actually do nothing together.

The luxury of us being able to do nothing and everything together is a ginormous one. We lead extremely chaotic and stressful lives in London, and it was especially crazy before we left. So the honeymoon wasn't only a gift; it was a goddamn necessity.

Also got to do things like read actual books (with pages and everything), take naps whenever we felt like it, in between eating, swimming and walking through the world's oldest rainforest. Where I thought it had disappeared forever, I actually got my [life] mojo back.

Ah, the rainforest. If there's a landscape that intrigues me the most (think desert, savannah, mountains, seaboard..) I'd have to say it's the Earth's fucking lungs.
This one is 130 million years old. It saw dinosaurs and shit. When I'm stressed and they say, "Imagine your calm place," I imagine cool, green, forests. This was green, but it was also about 43 degrees Celsius. Rainforests are the Earth's natural saunas. You sweat like a Swede.

They are also alive. They don't stop moving; they're filled with crazy, dangerous, bizarre creatures and plants. So, in lieu of staying in and walking through lots of rainforest with guides (one who was doing a pHD in rainforest sciency stuff), I thought I'd share this aspect of our honeymoon with you.

If plants, animals and weird shit with trees doesn't interest you, well,..fuck you.

This is an Orang Utan. Which means "man of the forest." You can only find these dudes in Borneo. They contain 96% of the same DNA as humans. Only one down from the gorilla, who is our closet animal relative. And bananas apparently.

Here's a mama, with her baba clinging on while she swings from the ropes. This was at a sanctuary near Sandikan, a city in the north-eastern tip of the island, near the Philippines.

They're not shy. They like shiny things and have been known to take cameras off people, as well as clothes. Stripped a French lady naked, or so we were told by our gregarious guide. (What was she wearing?)

We spent almost a week in a communal camp - a basic wooden collection of stilted houses on the Kinabatangan River. It's wild. There are not a lot of humans that live here. We went to a small rainforest village, otherwise it was us and trees and a fuckload of monkeys everywhere.

We were on a 'rainforest safari'- we did everything people would do going on safari in Africa, or going on an Okavango house boat trip, say. Game drives, (on boats with a guide) and eating a lot. Huge Malaysian-style buffets, and jungle walks.

 Our bungalow.
They always cooked and served us breakfast inside the jungle, which was amazing.

We stayed on the boardwalk when we went into the forest. Rainforests are wet. So if you walk on the ground, you're usually in mud, mangroves or puddles. Which are FILLED with leeches. That apparently always find a spot of skin to suck your blood. They sense you. What the actual fuck.
So yeah, did it the boring way.

The jungle camp was filled with bougainvillea. River in front. Filled with crocodiles. Above us in the forest was a sleepy Orang Utan the staff call Ross.

My favourite time to enter the jungle was at night. Mainly because the temperature had dropped by a fraction and you could think straight. During the morning walks, you sweat like I sweat after an hour on a treadmill.

It's humid, the air is so thick you have to just breathe. Very slowly. But the noise! At night, the jungle literally pulses with life. The birds come out and start shrieking, the snakes are out, mahoosive insects. It's CREEPY AS FUCK. Which makes it the biggest rush ever.
You have to put insect repellent over every atom of skin, because you'll get bitten literally every second. (We counted. Mozzies love the Brit. And he got bitten every. Single. Second in a place he forgot to put repellent.)

This is the shit you see on the safari cruises and in the jungle.

 Spiders as large as your hand. They hunt in packs. There were another 7 of these bad boys nearby.

My favourite thing EVER: a smoking fucking mushroom.We felt like we had stumbled into Alice In Wonderland by accident. This mushroom fully emits smokes at night (hence the smoky tendrils), to keep predators away. What do you reckon if you ate it: high or die?

Flowers are LOUD in rainforests. Couldn't hear myself think next to this one.

 When the tropical rains come (almost every afternoon) you do a rain dance. Or stand in it to cool down. It comes down in sheets and it's bloody marvelous.

 Everywhere you turn, there's something to see. Spiders, snakes, weird insects. You just need to look.

 Like this.

 This is a wild pig. The staff call him Junior. He's semi-tame, and he hops up - cloven hoves and all - onto the deck for toast in the morning where we eat breakfast.

 We saw a herd of pygmy Asian elephants on the banks having an evening graze. Much smaller than our African counterparts, and less anxious.

 Vines baby. It's all about the vines.

 And the rain. You literally see steam come off your skin when you stand in the beautiful, miraculous, amazing rain.

 On a river cruise, looking for stuff. Like the boat ahead.

See if you can spot it - a green viper. Back-fanged, haemotoxic. (I know my snakes; I know my enemy.) Probably the most common snake. Not particularly long either, but everywhah.

 We also saw a cat snake (black and yellow stripes - screams danger and yet, false alarm! It isn't), and another grey snake with a red tongue that the Brit almost stood on on the way to breakfast. He was so chilled. 'Oh check it out,' he says, like he's pointing towards a pair of alloy wheels.
"GET BACK, STAND BACK, NOW." Was how I approached the situation.

More weird, strangely formed flowers. Get a load of these.

 Night viewing.

This is the small village near to our lodge. Built on stilts, as the river floods regularly. They have some solar panels installed for the school. Put it this way, these people aren't on Facebook.

They treated us with special care, bless them. Every night they did something new for us and other honeymooning couples there. Baked a cake one night, gave us a concert the next, and then one night mysteriously made us coke floats.

After 'roughing' it in the jungle like a bunch of hobos (fuck did I enjoy it, despite the humidity and heat), we went all. out. luxury. five star. private.tropical.island.for.six. full. days.

Which I'll share another day. It was fucking sublime.

maltese falcons

Quick.

Five reasons to go to Malta.

1) It's scorchio. 36 degrees in the summer. Right now.
2) It's fucking old. 700 BC is what one town, Mdina, is dated back to.
3) It has the most clear, crystaline, tourquoise Mediterranean water you've ever seen
4) You can jump off boats and rocks with reckless abandon
5) It's literally an architect's paradise

Typical Maltese-style buildings, in Valetta. With the added charm of laundry hung out to dry. The laundry always looks amazingly breezy, not shit.

My granny was born there, and I really wondered why she ever left and went back to England. I suppose she was about 7 and didn't have much of a choice. But still. Still.

I EasyJetted in, and was immediately met with a simmering 38 degree temperature. Usually I get heatstroke in such climes,  but somehow after three ice creams and two gin and tonics it didn't really bother me. It was fucking perfect, to be fair.

We had hired an apartment from a dude at Air B&B (literally the best thing, bar fun hostels, for holidays. Hotels can be so sterile, impersonal, not fun or adventurous at all. Apartments you feel part of the vibe and more of a traveller as opposed to a tourist.)

The entrance to our apartment.

 Me. On the balcony. Behaving like Eva Peron.

Dove was only due to arrive a few hours later, so the dude and his girlfriend took me out for some lunch in Valetta, the beautiful town we were staying at. Had we stayed at a hotel, this would never had happened. So they showed me around, and told me where we should go.

After fully checking out Valetta and marveling at the beautiful jutting out balconies, shutters and dilapidated stone, we headed to St Paul's Bay in the northern part of the island. It seemed nice at the time, but it wasn't as pretty as the other parts of the island we went to.
Either way, Malta is small - a 45 minute bus journey from one side to the other, using an all day bus card for only 2.60 euros, so you can't really go wrong.

It's also extremely Catholic. So Catholic is Malta, that they believe that 'Italians don't have much of a moral compass.' A Maltese man told me that. The pope is Italian. So when I say they're Catholic and devout and hectic, I'm not pulling your chain.
Divorce was illegal in Malta until three years ago.
There are more churches on the island than cars.
It's frowned upon to walk around showing too much skin.

And to think that once upon a time I was Catholic. Interesting.

The one thing with this place, as it's so sunbaked and hot, is that when you're on the coast you basically need to jump into the sea every twenty minutes to cool your body temperature down enough that it's not the same as Satan's when he's sitting in the firepit of hell.

The sea is extremely salty - there are caked areas of salt on the rocks, and you float. It's true salt makes you float, which is kind of novel, until you dry off in the sun and you're one big salt cake.

There aren't a lot of sandy beaches in Malta, so you end up jumping off the rocks. But there are always little ladders everywhere so you can jump off wherever you please.

 Our rock near the apartment.

The day afterwards we found the most beautiful part of the place, entitled 'The Blue Grotto,' on the southern tip of Malta.

'The Blue Grotto' just sounds nice.  And by fuck, it really was.
 The tiny village of Zurrieq near the grotto is just a cluster of houses - a restaurant or two, a pub and a shop. It's perfect. It's all you'd ever need on holiday.
We took a boat trip around the coast, where all the blue caves were, and the boat guide drove us inside all of them. We could jump off the boat and swim, it was just amazing, the colour of the water and how clean and crazy it was.

 Dove snorkelling. And hanging out in waters that are 12 metres deep, but don't look like it.

 It's very rocky and arid, but there's something really sparse and lovely about semi-desert.

 the local fresh fish restaurant in Zurrieq.

 Yeah.. so it's a bit shit.

We ate fresh fish for lunch and then bought a whole bunch of gear. ("All the gear, no idea.") for the shop. Snorkel, goggles and two lilos. The Med is so flat, so lilos are king. You just float and hang onto the thing, and chill out on the water.

We did this all afternoon. God it was sublime. The world was a million miles away.

We also visited Mdina, the walled city in Malta, where battles were fought, and all sorts of shit went down on the hills of Malta around 700 BC. Oh and Game of Thrones was filmed here. Which is obviously a huge thing.*

 Midina is on the top of the highest 'hill' in Malta, in the centre, to protect itself from the barrage of wars that have happened since 700 BC. There have been lots. Obvs.

 This is me. Trailing the streets and loving my hat. Got majorly attached to this white straw hat I found in the apartment. And didn't steal. But still think about.

 Horse and carts coming barreling towards you in the tiny alleyways; if you don't find a door frame to duck into, you die. Adds a nice edge to the holiday.

 Only 400 people live in Mdina, and most of them are rich. And live in houses that look like this.

It was a cool 38 degrees, so we ate a lot of ice cream. Luckily the houses are tall and light, so when you walk through the tiny alleyways it's actually quite cool. Just don't stand in the middle of the town square with the sun beating down.

On our final night, we decided to demolish a bottle of wine, Peas and Dove style, and create a story or script in our heads. Which we did. so watch this space. Or rather, watch Twitter. Not this space. We are going to be THE NEXT BIG THING. Let's not rip the ring out of it; we are going to be huge. It'll be nice if we are.

After the wine we thought we'd either:
1) Blow up our seven euro lilos, and use them as inflatable toboggans to do stair races.

On the 2000 year old steps in front of our apartment.
But then we thought, "we might perhaps break ourselves open or crush our coxixes, or bruise ourselves to absolute shit. And wake up the Catholics."

2) Find a nice place to drink more wine.

The stairs. For reference.

We stumbled into a little bistro owned by two Italians, and sat with them at the last table on the street, as they poured us delicious wine and cut us pieces of saucisson. They, in beautiful and typical Italian fashion, said that their bistro was not a restaurant, it was 'art.'

"Ziss-a is-a not-a a restaurant. Ziss-a is-a art-a. We will-a make-a sure za people-a zat come-a here are ...artists-a."

Fair enough.

We went on the search for another bottle of wine after the art-restaurant conversation seemed to start repeating itself over and over again, and luckily didn't find another bottle.

I never did see which hospital my granny was born in, and we never did find Manuel, the hairdresser Dove's mum nearly married.

But I do think I'd love to go back, it's one place on the Med that is extremely underrated.

* I don't watch it. The Brit does. I think it's a bit of a hype-shit.