It was hard to leave Nepal after our wonderful two months there. We enjoyed the trekking in the mountains, the beauty of the Lakes, the wondrous animals in Chitwan, the ancient cities around Kathmandu and speaking at the Nepal Tourism Board for a Reader’s Club Event. Twenty-five people gathered to hear us talk about travel, writing and our book. It was the first time we ever read from our memoir about our first year sabbatical in Asia. After the event, the feature editor from The Himalayan Times interviewed us for over an hour. Click here to see the FULL PAGE article that recently was in print and photo below.
Our first goal when we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was to repair our MacBook Air. I cracked the screen during our Langtang Trek and we had been without a computer for weeks. After several online conversations, I was certain that iMalaysia would be able to help us quickly and for a good price. When we arrived at the mall, their shop was closed forever. I was really disappointed.
Two wonderful workers in a nearby shop directed us upstairs and we found Lim Ching Sheng at EGate Service Center, www.egateservice.com.my
who recovered all the data from my harddrive and then bought the broken laptop as repairing it was out of my budget for time and money. I then met Azmi of Umer Enterpriseswww.umeronline.my at Low Yat Plaza who had the only MacBook Air on sale in the entire multi-story building. We had a working computer and could leave for the beach!
Salang Beach at Tioman Island had good snorkeling in warm clear water with creatures like a coral stingray, moray eel, colorful nudibranchs and several large turtles. We stayed three nights on the beach at Ella’s and then traveled North in the pouring rain to the #1 highlight for Malaysia in the Lonely Planet, the Perhentian Islands. We only stayed three nights on Perhentian Besar because all the rooms were booked and we had to go. Flora Bay Resort was right on the beach and we snorkeled with a 6ft black tip reef shark! Sin at Lemon Grass Hotel on Long Beach, Perhentian Kecil, told us about the baby black tip reef sharks. We found a dozen of them all swimming in a straight line. On two other snorkel adventures, we saw another large six-foot black tip reef shark. Really great snorkeling! We enjoyed our two weeks in Malaysia and are off to Thailand!
Thank you to everyone who has shared our journey literally on the road with us or by reading and commenting on our newsletter and website! AND for watching : Our channel just went OVER 75,000 views!
Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs. Niver is a speaker at the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas Travel and Adventure Shows for 2023. Her podcast, “Make Your Own Map,” has been watched in more than 11 countries on 4 continents. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster.
You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have nearly 2 million views.
With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club.
As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries.
For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty times.
Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals
including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo.
https://bit.ly/m/lisaniver
Awards
National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards
2021 Winner: Book Critic: Ms. Magazine “Untamed: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out”
2019 Winner: Soft News Feature for Film/TV: KTLA TV “Oscars Countdown to Gold with Lisa Niver”
2019 Finalist for: Soft News, Business/Music/Tech/Art
Southern California Journalism Awards
2022 Finalist: Book Criticism
2021 Winner: Technology Reporting
2021 Finalist: Book Criticism
2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt”
2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature
2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway”
2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile
2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers”
Social Media Presence
YouTube Channel: We Said Go Travel (1.7 million views)
Short form video:TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts
Twitter: lisaniver (90,000 followers)
Instagram: lisaniver (24,000 followers)
Pinterest: We Said Go Travel (20,000 followers and over 70,000 monthly views)
Facebook: lisa.niver (5,000 followers); We Said Go Travel (3,000 followers)
LinkedIn: lisaellenniver (9000 contacts)
It was hard to leave Nepal after our wonderful two months there. We enjoyed the trekking in the mountains, the beauty of the Lakes, the wondrous animals in Chitwan, the ancient cities around Kathmandu and speaking at the Nepal Tourism Board for a Reader’s Club Event. Twenty-five people gathered to hear us talk about travel, writing and our book. It was the first time we ever read from our memoir about our first year sabbatical in Asia. After the event, the feature editor from The Himalayan Times interviewed us for over an hour. Click here to see the FULL PAGE article that recently was in print and photo below.
Our first goal when we arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was to repair our MacBook Air. I cracked the screen during our Langtang Trek and we had been without a computer for weeks. After several online conversations, I was certain that iMalaysia would be able to help us quickly and for a good price. When we arrived at the mall, their shop was closed forever. I was really disappointed.