25 August: The bags are packed and we are ready for our first adventure.

After a 12.5h flight we reached Singapore at 5.30am. The flight was long but pretty good thanks to in-flight entertainment and kids’ menus. Given Singapore’s great public transport we hopped onto the MRT followed by bus to reach our hotel in Pasir Ris. First thing on the agenda after we finally got to check in was SLEEP 😊. We then headed over to the water park. What better way to fight a jetlag than heading down a couple of slides. The park was included in our hotel so we actually spent a few hours there every day.

Tuesday afternoon we headed over to Gardens by the Bay. Took us almost 1h to get there but it was definitely worth it. We decided to skip the paid gardens and only wander through the park. Definitely a good decision for us because we probably only managed to see about 70% before the little legs got tired. We admired the Marina Bay Sands Hotel from the outside (400 SGP Dollars is slightly above our budget) and we really enjoyed all the lights after dark.

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Our last day in Singapore we wandered through China Town and Little India (of course only after a few hours at the waterpark). Benefit of Little India: the whole family loves Indian Food so we enjoyed a nice vegetarian meal.

And then it was already time to say Good Bye to Singapore and head over to our next Destination Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia.

Liebe Grüße von Levin, Melia, Lena & Felix (written by Levin).

What’s the plan?

The plan is to plan as little as possible. We don’t really know what to expect and what kind of travellers we will be. Do we want to see as many places as possible or do we want to spend longer periods at the same place? Do we like Hotels or Hostels or Airbnb? We don’t know the answers yet so we want to only plan about 4 weeks ahead.

Of course we have an idea of where we want to go and the first 4 weeks are booked. On 25 August we will fly from Amsterdam to Singapore, followed by Borneo on 29 August and Bali on 11 September. We want to spend 4-5 months in South East Asia and possibly Northern Australia, followed by 3-4 months in Central and North America.

And your house, insurance, car etc?

That is all sorted 😊. Yes, it was a lot of work!

Our house is listed on Airbnb.

Our Our car is with friends, who were coincidentally looking for a family car. Win Win for all of us.

Insurances have been the greatest challenge along the way. We had to find a home insurance that also covers renting your place via Airbnb. Luckily some insurances have started to include this in their terms, in our case Centraal Beheer. More effort was the health insurance that covers you even if you are not registered in the Netherlands. Here we figured out that you remain under the NL health insurance legislation if you do not register elsewhere and do not work while travelling. You just need to request this via SVB.nl and then add an extra long term Travel Insurance (again Centraal Beheer). The most painful insurance proved to be the personal liability insurance. These almost always require you to be registered in the country of insurance. There are a few providers specialized in cases where citizens temporarily leave the country, however, our situation of having a German passport while being residents of The Netherlands proved to be extra challenging. The EU has brought us a long way but there is some room for improvement when it comes to personal liability insurances. The Dutch insurances basically said: Nope, we cannot take you because you have a German passport and as such we do not think you will return to the Netherlands. The German insurance on the other hand said: Nope, we cannot take you because you have been living in NL for >5 years and as such we do not see you as German residents anymore. Oh what a joy! We finally managed to find the one special provider who also covered our special circumstances (www.deutsche-im-ausland/haftpflichtversicherung). All that we now needed was a German Bank Account and a German Address (makes sense for people living in NL, right). We now know that it is no problem to get a German Bank Account as long as you can provide a German address, which was no problem for us given our families live there.

Our jobs are on hold. Felix quit his job in July already and will look for a new job once we are back. I am taking 6 months of unpaid parental leave and will return to my current position. For now we are not concerned, we will start thinking about that chapter again towards the end of our travels.