This Sunday isn’t boring as we have the MATTA Fair to visit. This fair held in PWTC involved many tour and travel companies, groups and organizations which offers various holiday packages and services to tourist destinations within Malaysia or abroad. I used to visit this popular fair annually (the fair is held twice a year in KL), and this year isn’t an exception as my family is as usual planning for a trip oversea for Chinese New Year holiday in 2016. But before the fair, we have already decided to go to Australia. This time around, once we arrived at the fair, our target is clear. Hence, we just spent a short time in the fair this year.
Before choosing Australia, Spain and Portugal came to our minds too. However, the price to these places is exceeding RM 10 000 easily for a person. This would be too burdening and we simply couldn’t afford it at the time of rising cost of living, GST, and depreciating RM value. I would be also using up a lot of money for my study in Masters next year too. Hence, the beautiful Spain and Portugal have to be out of my sight this time. Anyway, Australia is still a nice place to visit most probably and we have not visited this continent before. Hence, it would be cool for an opportunity to visit this country early next year.
There were still a huge crowd of people visiting the fair this year, indicating that Malaysians still love to travel despite all the economic crisis currently. However, we do learn from some staff of participating travel companies there that their sales dropped quite enormously in this year’s fair. People were just wandering in the fair looking for the lowest prices and most of them ended up booking low-cost packages or even not signing up for anything at all. The current economic situation in Malaysia really hits hard on us all.
For all these years, we were so used to travel with Golden Tour and Travel (GTT) company. My family is like friend with many of their friendly and easy-going staff. However for this time, we wish to try on different travel company since their tour itineraries to Sydney and Melbourne isn’t that ‘complete’, the hotels provided are only in 3-star, and the plane we are going to take is by AirAsia, the low-cost airline. The price is RM6400 per pax. We stopped by another company named Golden Deluxe and I’m quite excited by its itineraries despite a slightly higher price. The price by them is RM6800 per pax. However, this company provides better hotels (4-star), gives us Malaysia Airlines flight and shown to us that they are specialist in Australian tours. They won our hearts and we booked them for the tour package to Sydney and Melbourne in 7 days 5 nights during Chinese New Year holiday in 2016. Sorry, GTT…we will be back to your company next time soon.
Sydney :
Melbourne :
In this tour package, we would be visiting many places like Captain Cook’s Cottage, Crown Casino, Chinatown and Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Yarra Valley, Lavender Farm, Wineyard, Phillip Island (see penguins), Great Ocean Road, Twelve Apostles limestone stacks, and finally Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Star City Casino, Chinatown, Fish Market, Harbour Cruise, Koala Park Sanctuary (see koalas, kangaroos, wombats, etc), Blue Mountain and Sydney 2000 Olympic Stadium in Sydney. Yup…my excitement starts now for this trip! Have not been going anywhere for the past Hari Raya holiday and there is already a huge desire for travel in me now. Have to wait five more months for this trip to come. What a long wait.
(Images in this post are from various sources throughout the world wide web)
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