After three and a half months in Thailand, we crossed the border during Hari Raya into Malaysia. The end of Ramadan meant the streets and hotels were crowded in Penang. We found space at Hotel Hong Ping, which we would recommend to travelers in the area. The staff was very helpful and interested in our journey!
We met up again with fellow writers from California, Russell and Asia from http://www.ourfirst100days.com/ to celebrate launching our memoir. The Festival of the Pacific began by munching on Indian fare at the famous Line Clear Nasi Kandar. (see photo below).
We enjoyed seeing the sights of Penang that we had visited five years earlier and learning that our perceptions were different as we were in a different place in our relationship. More posts and photos of Penang and Cameron Highlands(see Boh Tea Plantation above) will be published soon.
The winners to our Independence Travel Writing Contest will be announced in the early days of September. Our Gratitude Travel Writing Contest will begin on September 11 and close on November 28 with the beginning of Chanukah and Thankgiving.
We appreciate all of you who read our newsletters, articles, website and BOOK! Thank you to everyone for your support of our journey and all our writing. We are participating intravel events in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Guam, Oahu and Los Angeles! Connect with us on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare , Twitter, and YouTube.
We will send our next news from the Philippines! Happy and Safe Travels!
We left last July for Indonesia for this one year journey and five years ago in July for our first one year sabbatical! Read our memoir, Traveling in Sin, to learn how we met online, and chose to meander from Indonesia to Mongolia. Along the way, I lost over fifty pounds and we got engaged underwater. This book is NOT a collection of blog posts. We have never published this story before! Enjoy all the colorful characters we met and the tears and triumphs of a Peace Corps Worker and a Princess (cruises employee) finding their way together in Asia.
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 represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc.
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.
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 over 1.6 million views. After three months on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, she had over 500,000 (1/2 million) views.
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.
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 (1.6 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)
Hello from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia!
We appreciate all of you who read our newsletters, articles, website and BOOK! Thank you to everyone for your support of our journey and all our writing. We are participating intravel events in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Guam, Oahu and Los Angeles! Connect with us on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare , Twitter, and YouTube.