Hi there! The Snail Travelers have just finished another month of slow travel, month 21.
We're going to tell you all about this month here in Malaysia.
But first let's do a quick review of our journey up until now so that we can get you caught up with our story.
Back in 2018 at the ages of 45 and 47 we decided to quit our jobs and spend some time slow traveling around the world.
Last month we left Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, and arrived at a mountain town called the Cameron Highlands.
Shortly after arriving a movement control order was issued due to the corona virus, and the country went into a complete lockdown.
So we spent most of last month in our apartment doing our hobbies and researching where to go next.
So under the movement control order only one member per household can go to the grocery store or to the pharmacy each day.
So here's Emily on her way to the grocery store.
So this is how boring our lives are right now; whenever it rains we've rushed over to the window and just kind of sit and watch the rain.
How exciting is that?
We've been travelling for 21 months now and this is the first place we've been where it's actually rained.
We didn't realize how much we miss the smell of the rain and the sound of the rain.
This is the world's loudest cat.
Hi cat, how you doing today, oh really, you having a good day, yeah.
So today it's my turn to go to the grocery store and as you can see almost everything is closed.
This is a resort town that has a reputation for having really heavy traffic, but not now.
We have the best Airbnb host ever. She brings us fresh vegetables from her garden.
We really appreciate that, and if there's something we want that she doesn't have from her garden she'll get it for us at the local produce store.
Alright, we are on our way to the grocery store together.
That's exciting because up until now only one person per household has been allowed to go to the grocery store.
But after 44 days be on a lockdown they now are allowing people to go out in pairs.
We're going to the store, it's not really a grocery store it's just a little mini market.
Just a few items but it has everything we need.
Emily's going into the grocery store and first she registers her passport so that they can do contact tracing it neaded.
And then she gets her temperature taken and a squirt of hand sanitizer.
So our Airbnb host just told us she left some kind of desert for us outside the front door so let's go see what it is.
She made for us these blueberry cheese tarts, cheesecake little things.
They look really good, they look so good.
Our food supply is very limited so we really appreciate this.
Okay so we found a new produce place today.
It was a long walk to get there, about half hour.
They didn't have a big selection, but the stuff they had was really fresh.
We loaded up on green beans, carrots, potatoes, onion, peppers, tons of tomatoes.
So we can make salsa, we're making some vegetable chili, this all cost about $4 for everything.
So each day for the past couple weeks we've spent many hours each day trying to figure out where we could go after our visa here our Malaysia expires.
We've been checking which countries are open and pretty much every country in the world right now is closed.
They're not letting people in except there's maybe two or three open countries but they do have restrictions and they're not very clear.
So we're not really sure right now what's going to happen.
We can always go back to the US if we have to.
We do not want to go back to the US if we can avoid it.
We know people back home in the US who've had a family member die from the virus or who've had the virus themselves.
There was something like 30,000 something new cases in the U.S. yesterday.
Here in Malaysia there were only 16 new cases in the entire country.
Not bad for a country with a population of 31 million people.
We're really hoping that we can extend our visa.
The immigration offices are just now starting to reopen.
We've been following on social media people who've been to the immigration offices to try and get an extension.
Some are getting extensions, some are being denied extensions.
So we don't know what's going to happen.
We have our appointment at the immigration office.
And so we're just going to hope for the best and hope that we can extend our stay here in Malaysia.
So that was our month this month.
Sorry we didn't have any exciting sightseeing or activities to show you under the lockdown.
The thing we're thankful for the most this month is the people of Malaysia.
Our Airbnb host has been absolutely fantastic, so helpful to us, and just people everywhere.
We were at a restaurant and we wanted to order something on the menu that they had run of.
They said oh we're so sorry, give us your phone number we'll call you in a few days when we have it.
We'll even hand deliver it to your apartment.
So we were not expecting that.
We also went to a bakery we tried to give them a tip they said no absolutely not there are people who need this money much more than than we do.
So they would not accept our tip.
And it just today we're out for a walk and the owner of the hostel where we stayed two months ago when the lockdown first started remembered us.
He asked us, hey did you ever get the refund for your stay here,
because he remembered that we're having problems with the credit card company trying to get our refund.
He even emailed us after we talked to him out on the street just to see how we're doing.
So everybody here has just been so wonderful.
Shout out by the way to the Pizzarella restaurant, to the Lord's Cafe which is kind of little bakery.
The Bricks Hostel has been wonderful.
And really everybody we've talked to and just come into contact with it's been wonderful.
And it's especially nice because we don't know anybody here.
We're very isolated under this lockdown so it's really really nice to have contact with friendly people, thank you.
So that's our video this month.
Be sure to check out some of our other videos from all over the world in the links above.
And also be sure to check out our website at snailtravelers.com to find out more about our world travel adventure.