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Asia Diaries: February 2025 ~ Relaxed Chengdu afternoon at the Wuhou Lantern Festival

A relaxing afternoon after a very hectic morning/half day of travel stress! My flight was originally scheduled for 2:20AM from Kuala Lumpur to Guangzhou, arriving at 6:40AM then I had a few hours layover until my flight to Chengdu at 9:30AM which got me in at 11:55AM. With almost 3 hours to enter China in Guangzhou and grab some breakfast, I should have been fine. But as we boarded the plane in Kuala Lumpur and settled in, the captain announced a 2 hour delay! They hoped we could maybe get an earlier slot (hence why we were boarded), but our departure slot was now 4:20AM =O That left me with under an hour to enter China (meaning go through passport control and get back through security again), won’t lie, that was a stressful thought! Because of that I didn’t get much/any sleep, and my seat neighbour didn’t help – he was a ‘manspreader’, not only putting his leg into my foot space (and his socked foot onto my bag?!?!) but also stretching up then leaning on my shoulder with his elbow?!?! So while he nodded off within about 5 minutes of them announcing the delay, I did not. We indeed took off 2 hours late and I think I managed 20 minutes of sleep here and there, but definitely not enough – at least I had brought some snacks.

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Asia Diaries: February 2025 ~ 24 hours in KUALA LUMPUR for the first time + Zoo Negara Malaysia

After 2 days in Singapore, it was time to move on to my next destination, another first – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! After a busy panda-filled day at River Wonders, I took the bus+metro back to my hotel, collected my luggage and booked my Grab to the airport. It’s super speedy and I had plenty of time for my 9:20PM flight – being neighbours, it’s 1hr 10 minute flight from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, and I made sure to have time to quickly check out the cool airport that is Changi!

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Asia Diaries: February 2025 ~ Lets go to SINGAPORE for the first time!

After having such an amazing trip to China and Hong Kong in May 2024, I already knew I needed to plan to return again. I spent some time over the Summer of 2024 thinking about where and when I might like to go – having always had a good experience with seeing cubs on my November China trips, a Winter trip was very appealing. Looking at the timing of Chinese New Year and also my field hockey schedule, I ended up with a ‘sweet spot’ of time in February. I also knew I wanted to see pandas somewhere new, so I focused on Asia so that I would be able to easily get to China as well – and in the end Singapore won^ Let’s get started with the Asia Diaries: February 2025.

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China Diaries: May 2024 #8 ~ Chengdu>Hong Kong 

Onto the final part of my trip – time to visit Hong Kong for the first time! I had a great few days in Chengdu to round up my time in mainland China. When I was looking at flights, there are no options from Chengdu directly back to Europe, so I was going to need to transfer somewhere like Shanghai or Beijing – I’d already started my trip in Shanghai, and I was in Beijing back in September 2023, so I had a look around and found Hong Kong was an option. With both pandas and Disney to see, I was sold!

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