After two years of saving, planning and talking about it, the big Asia trip — six weeks through Indonesia and Sri Lanka — finally kicked off. And like most of our trips, it started with a healthy dose of chaos before we even left the house.
A slightly chaotic goodbye to Denmark
It was around 35 degrees in Denmark on departure day, which is roughly 20 degrees more than the country is built for. The plan had been calm and organised. The reality was four people sweating their way through last-minute packing while the cat sitter was about to move in. Noah had promised to clean the house — a noble plan comprehensively undermined by a night out with his classmates. He didn’t just feel fragile; he spent the morning actually throwing up, on and off, right up until about 4pm. Line was… not impressed. The one small mercy was that our train didn’t leave until after 5pm, so by the time we had to move he had (mostly) stopped. That left the rest of us, and Line in particular, to finish the cleaning and packing at speed, in the heat, around a sick teenager. A relaxing start it was not.
Then came the journey to Hamburg, where we were flying from. We had picked the train for the slow-travel romance of it. Instead one train was cancelled, the next was delayed, and we rolled into our Hamburg hotel around 11pm — with the alarm already set for 4–4:30am to make the airport. So the night before a very long flight clocked in at roughly four hours of sleep. Off to a flying start (the bad kind). On the train Jesper kept cool with a folding fan and his dignity mostly intact; Noah simply gave up and fell asleep on his shoulder.
From Hamburg it was onward via Istanbul to Kuala Lumpur — two flights and a layover stitched together on no sleep. Some of us made up for it in the air (the photographic evidence of Jesper is frankly unflattering). Line and Vitus, between them, managed almost none — a fact that would become relevant for the next 36 hours.
One day, one city, very little sleep
We landed in Kuala Lumpur around 6am. The sensible thing after the journey we'd just had would have been to find a bed. Instead we decided to squeeze every drop out of the long stopover before our flight to Indonesia the next day. We jumped on the KLIA Express — a brilliant, fast train straight into the city — and were in central KL by 9am.
First stop: Chinatown and Central Market. We were, it turned out, slightly too keen — we arrived before most of it had properly woken up. We killed time with the most glamorous of travel errands, a pharmacy run for mosquito spray, then wandered back through the lanterns and stalls of Chinatown as it slowly came to life.
It did not take long for the heat and humidity to deliver their verdict: wandering a big city all day was not going to be the move. Lesson noted.
So we did what we always do when in doubt — we found food. A food court turned out to be the perfect democratic solution, where everyone could order exactly what they wanted under one roof. Jesper, Line and Noah went for Thai — green curry and pad thai — while Vitus, in a city full of incredible Malaysian food, made the bold cultural choice of KFC. We also walked past this masterpiece of advertising, which we still think about: "HFC – Healthy Fried Chicken." Genius.
The Petronas Towers
Properly fed, we headed to the obvious KL landmark: the Petronas Towers. You see them in photos a hundred times, but standing in the KLCC park beneath them — all 88 storeys and 452 metres of them — with the fountains going and the Malaysian flags lined up, they really are something. We wandered the park (which is genuinely lovely, tree-roots and ponds and all), watched the fountains, and took roughly the same photo as every other visitor in history.
Then we retreated into the air-conditioned mall, including a deeply memorable stretch of standing around waiting while Line found a toilet. Travel is glamorous.
Somewhere in here we also met the unofficial highlight of the day, at least for the boys: a shop cat in a little harness, holding court among the suitcases at a luggage shop. Noah and Vitus were instantly far more interested in the cat than in any record-breaking skyscraper, which is exactly the kind of priorities we've come to expect. It wasn't even the only cat KL had to offer — the city is full of them, including one we found later completely passed out in the middle of a park path, a mood we all deeply related to by that point.
An unplanned shopping spree at Decathlon
The next stop was meant to be quick and surgical: pop into Decathlon, buy a pair of trekking trousers, leave. We did not leave with a pair of trekking trousers. We left with merino T-shirts, UV swim shirts, snorkelling masks, socks and a small mountain of other gear for the trip and beyond. If you've ever "just nipped into" a Decathlon, you know exactly how this goes.
Disc golf at Ara Damansara Park
By late afternoon Noah finally got his wish. He had been campaigning all day for one thing: disc golf. With no better city plan and a few hours of daylight left, we caved, hopped on a train about an hour out of Kuala Lumpur, and went to play the Ara Damansara Park Disc Golf Course, which is billed as one of Malaysia's best.
It was a genuinely lovely course set in a park — and also, in places, gloriously confusing, with vague hole layouts and numbering that seemed to follow its own private logic. Thank goodness for the UDisc app, which stopped us wandering the wrong fairways for hours. Noah and Jesper played doubles and absolutely caught fire, finishing nine under par. Vitus did his own thing, walking the course hunting Pokémon, while Line took on the dual role of photographer and person heroically trying not to fall asleep in the shade after several nights of almost no sleep.
Dinner, and Noah's very close call
For dinner we tried another food court — Food Garden — which we eventually located on the sixth floor after first, confidently, searching the basement. Strong reviews; reality somewhat less exciting. But the day saved its most memorable moment for the trip home.
Waiting on a very quiet, very empty platform, Noah — running on the same fumes as the rest of us — fell asleep sitting up, slumped forward with his head resting in his hands. From behind he just looked like he was studying his shoes, which is exactly why nobody noticed. When the train pulled in, Jesper, Line and Vitus started boarding without clocking that the fourth member of the family hadn't moved. Noah woke at the last possible second, registered his entire family stepping onto a train without him, and sprinted across the platform to dive through the closing doors. Had he been a beat slower, he'd have been stranded alone on an empty platform with roughly an hour until the next train — and, as we only realised afterwards, with a completely dead phone battery, so we'd have had no way to reach him at all. We laughed about it afterwards. Mostly. We laughed about it afterwards. Mostly.
A proper sleep — and a scary morning
Back at the airport hotel we finally got what we'd been missing for days: a proper night's sleep, all the way through to about 8am. Glorious. The morning, however, had other plans. Airport breakfast options were grim, we ended up at Burger King, and there Vitus suddenly doubled over with severe stomach pain — crying and writhing on the floor, completely unlike him. With just over an hour until our flight, we got genuinely scared.
This mattered more than your average travel-day wobble, because flights to Flores, our next stop, are rare — possibly only once a week — so missing this one could have unravelled the entire first chunk of the Indonesia plan. We started moving toward the airport medical clinic, Jesper carrying Vitus while Line went ahead to find a doctor.
And then, as suddenly as it had come on, Vitus announced he felt better. The turnaround was almost suspiciously fast, but we weren't about to argue with it. We spun around, hustled through the airport, made it through security, reached the gate — and found that boarding hadn't even started. From "the Indonesia plan might be over before it begins" to "we made it with time to spare" in about fifteen minutes. We collapsed into our seats and, finally, pointed ourselves at Flores.
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