Toronto, Canada

We arrived back home in Toronto on one of the nicest days so far this winter -- it was 1C and clear skies. The days before and after it was -20C with a lot of flight cancellations so we were lucky.

It was an 8 hour flight from Singapore to Beijing. Even in winter, the air in Beijing was really polluted. We couldn't see the control tower from the airport, it was so bad. We had a 5 hour layover between the flights. We looked around at the lunch options. The wait staff were surprisingly active in their sales pitch, with menus thrust into our faces as we walked by. I've seen that in streetside restaurants, but never in an airport!

Then it was a 13 hour flight to Toronto. After the efficiency of Singapore's airport, Toronto's Pearson looked downright bad. In Singapore, it took us 20 minutes from landing to being in a taxi. In Toronto, it was a 20 minute walk from the plane to the arrivals terminal! Then a bottleneck going through immigration and customs. And then it took 90 minutes for the first bag to appear on the conveyor! (this was in good weather too). It might almost be faster to fly into Buffalo and drive to Toronto.

Overall our trip was great. We really enjoyed the adventure stuff in Borneo: trekking through the rainforest in Danum Valley, diving in Sipadan, and exploring the caves at Mulu Park. The wildlife was more difficult to spot in the rainforest (say compared to a safari in Africa), and while we did see proboscis monkeys and orangutans, it was from a distance. It was still really cool though. The food wasn't as great as the hype we had read - maybe because in Toronto it's pretty easy to get the same variety of food and so we weren't easily impressed. In the smaller towns (Ipoh, Penang) we had some really great food, using food bloggers for suggestions. In the big cities (KL, Singapore) it was more hit-and-miss.

The big cities also weren't as photogenic as I had thought. On the other hand, Penang was great for pictures - I have a separate album just with the street art in Penang.