The Clark Family's Amazing Adventures

Season’s Greetings from Bali. to our friends, families and blog readers – hope you have a fun and peaceful holiday time and a very Happy New Year 2014.

Christmas Bali Style

Hope you enjoy the little bit of festive frivolity that follows as much as we enjoyed making it!

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We’ve just arrived from Singapore back to Bali where we`ve rented a beautiful villa for three weeks overlooking rice paddies.

Our garden, view and homemade Christmas tree!

December on the road began quite dramatically (for me anyway!) with an earthquake in Sumatra which you can read about here! Then we headed into the hot jungle, trekked to see orangutans, sang ‘Jungle Trek’ to the tune of Jingle Bells with our friendly guides, washed and scrubbed elephants in the river, rafted on huge inner tubes tied together down white water rivers and swam across them to soak in hidden hot pools. And Martin finally got to pull the straps out on the wheely rucksack and carry it for real after 17 months!

In the jungle – Sumatra

Then we flew to Penang, Malaysia, where we met and shared some fun times with wonderful new friends and enjoyed a few festivities in the sparkly shopping malls. It was especially wonderful to be invited to stay with Darcy, Katie and their twin boys who offered us (complete strangers!) a place to stay after meeting through a travelling families online group we are part of. We ended up staying 10 days and had a blast! Lara especially enjoyed being ‘big’ sister to the boys!

Friends and Festivities in Penang, Malaysia

In the last few days we’ve visited Legoland in Malaysia, had a joyful reunion with Oma, Martin’s Mum who begins her own travels after finally selling her house and we’ve celebrated Lara’s 6th birthday. Our winter solstice baby celebrated her second summer solstice birthday in a row – this year at Universal Studios in Singapore getting some adrenaline kicks and meeting Santa 🙂

Santa popped into Universal Studios, Singapore!

We spent our first day back in Bali making our own tree from a log, coat hangers and some greenery from our beautiful garden and decorating the villa! We’re pretty proud of ourselves! We made snow too and last night we got together with friends and had a hoot decorating gingerbread houses! It’s great to be spending another simple, low key Christmas together and the kids were surprisingly happy to pick up some cute but very little stockings for Santa so he knows not to overload them with things they can’t carry in their rucksacks!

There are still a lot of stories to share from our year and now I have a desk and wifi for three weeks overlooking this view, perhaps I can do some serious catch up. Meanwhile have a wonderful Yuletide and hope to Skype with some of you over the next few days….