Malaysia

So here we are in Malaysia and our first stop Georgetown on Penang Island with its Chinese, Islam, Indian and Malay influences it’s the proverbial cultural melting pot. We turned up at a strange place, in the dark, without anywhere to stay…again. The first couple of hotel’s were full and as it was getting late we made the budget busting decision to stay at the Malaysia Hotel. Unfortunately our conversion skills weren’t up to scratch and we paid way more that we thought we did. But the room had a great view and with a complimentary newspaper delivered to your door everyday, plus a bathroom that actually had a bath in it, the price was easily forgotten…who says this backpacking lark is difficult! A free buffet breakfast was also a bonus, so I made up for the price of the room by eating 8 fried eggs a day, that’ll learn ‘em. Georgetown is a lovely place, with some interesting history and great food. We had a wander around Fort Cornwallis, the oldest British settlement in Malaysia and on the way passed a very white St Georges Anglican church, the oldest church in SE Asia. We also popped our heads in to some smokey Chinese temples, Islamic Mosques and down a very loud Little India. There were some beautifully restored buildings too, including the 19th Century Baba-Nonya ‘Penang Peranakan’ Mansion, where only the night before the local Mafia could be found smoking opium…but you didn’t hear that from me, right?

We took a day trip out by bus to see Kek Lok Si Temple with its big Buddha and some seriously cramped turtles (see the photo), then rode the funicular 121 metres up Penang Hill pointed out our hotel in the distance and came back down again. We also had our first taste of liquid gold, 5 pounds for a pint dammit! Beer intake was dramatically decreasing from here on in.

Kuala Lumpur was our next stop and boy we thought we paid a lot for a room in Georgetown. For a few more quid a night we bagged ourselves a dingy windowless box in squat of a hotel with only ESPN as a plus point. KL is a great city. We shot up 41 floors in 40 seconds of the Petronas Towers, which according to my reliable source tells me are 266 times my height. We looked out the window, pointed out our hotel and came back down again. Then we went over to the Aquarium with a 90 meter underwater tunnel and touched-up some starfish.

Day two took us to the Lake Gardens, which not only has the biggest covered walk-through aviary in the world, but also the largest butterfly garden. On the long walk back to town we dropped by the Masjid Negara mosque, where we dressed up like Emperor Palpatine from Starwars to have a look inside. We had a lovely chat with a guide and he gave us a book called, ‘20 most common questions about Islam’. Here’s a paragraph on why Pork is forbidden: ‘The pig is the most shameless animal on earth. It is the only animal that invites its friends to have sex with its mate. In America, most people consume pork. Many times after dance parties, they have swapping of wives, i.e many say “you sleep with my wife and I will sleep with your wife”. could it be that eating pork promotes pig culture?’ Interesting stuff. We spent our evenings in KL drinking Carlsberg very slowly and pondering the logistics of building a beer pipeline from Vietnam to Malaysia. This time next year we‘ll be millionaires, etc etc.

After a few days we took a bus to Jerantut, then a long boat down stream to Kuala Tahan. The town is nothing to write home about, but the location is top class, right in the heart of Taman Negara, the oldest rainforest in the world. It was like the land that time forgot, don’t you think there’s something so beautifully medieval about having to pay the boatman 2 Ringitts to cross the river? Our first activity was a guided jungle night walk where we annoyed some scorpions by poking them with a big stick and became very friendly with more Leeches than you could shake a bloody leg at. The next day we wobbled across a canopy walkway between huge Mersawa Keruing and Keledan trees 40 metres above ground and had a climb up Bukit Teresik hill to point at our hotel and climb back down again. Sadly we didn’t spot the elusive tigers, but did see some deer and Civets at a salt lick, wild pigs, monkeys, snakes, Sea Eagles, spiders, Monitor Lizards, Water Buffallo, Squirrels, huge ants and had fruit bats try and molest me in a pitch black cave. We had a great time and even stumbled into an Orang Asli minority tribe village, where we paused for an awkward few seconds before stumbling back out again. After two days of trekking in the humidity and sweat we thought it was time to move on.

Next up came a 12hr scenic train ride through the jungle to the Islamic north eastern city of Kota Bharu.
We turned up in the dark as usual, but this time we learnt from our mistakes and had booked our accommodation in advance. Unfortunately there were two hotels with exactly the same name and the taxi driver took us to the wrong one! Such is life. This hotel was very average and the room was only half carpeted! Not in a cool urban chic bare floorboard kind of way, more of a ‘bugger, we’ve just ran out of carpet…lets leave it and hope they don’t notice’ kind of way.

We took a few days to have a look around the town and people watch. Bank Kerapu museum has a nice collection of photo’s from the Japanese occupation in WWII and another had a cool weapons gallery. We ate some good Satay from a hawker stall and feeling cocky ordered some Roti in a café thinking we were getting something mildly exotic, but which turned out to be a slice of Kingsmill with some butter on. Sadly when Pizza Hut is a town’s gourmet highlight you know you’re in trouble and have a look at the photo from the market and see why we decided chicken would be off the menu here. It’s interesting to experience a truly Islamic town, although it loses brownie points because I lost my Vietnam hat. I dropped it walking down the street and some bum must of picked it up…I loved that hat. We quickly got bored here so wanted to move on down the coast. Unfortunately it was Labour day (seriously this place has more public holidays than public work days), which meant all the buses out of town were fully booked for the next four days. We panicked a bit thinking we were going to have to spend all that time here, so just for the sake of our sanity we walked in to the bus depot and booked any bus we could get that had two available seats going south…we were off to Kuala Terengganu at 4am the next day.

As soon as we arrived in town we walked around all the bus company windows (there was a surprisingly large amount) to see if any had buses going on to Cherating down the coast, but everything was fully booked for the next two days. This place gets a big raspberry blowing thumbs down for being so bloody dull. There is just nothing to do, it‘s like going on holiday to Reading. It’s the sort of place that makes you want to just lie down on the pavement and slowly decompose. Homer Simspon once said, “No beer and no TV makes Homer go crazy” and we all laughed didn’t we? Well we ain’t laughing anymore. The only plus point was how cheap our room was, I think we paid 5 pounds per night for an en-suit with air-conditioning and with wall to wall carpets! Food choice was limited here and we had to resort to eating McDonalds for dinner. What is it about McDonalds, you stuff your face with burgers and fries, but afterwards you’re left feeling so empty inside? I did read an interesting article in a newspaper though. Apparently they might bring in a law forcing all women under the age of 21 to have a permission letter from their employer or a family member to travel abroad! Gordon Brown could learn a thing or two from these guys, or maybe not. Anyway, after two lonnnnnng days we were on a bus, destination Cherating.

I think we loved and hated this place in equal measure. The town is shabby and dirty, as is the beach, which is nothing to write home about. There is nowhere decent to eat and there is nothing to do in the evening. What made up for this was the resort we stayed in and the very lovely owners who upgraded us for free. Even better though was that we were the only guests! We spent the whole week playing around in the pool and being entertained by the sling-shot carrying staff having a poolside running battle with a troop of monkeys. At one point 5 monkeys ran passed us being chased off by an old woman wildly swinging at them with a broom, then 10 seconds later they all came back running the other way, but this time about 20 monkeys were chasing the screaming old woman back in to the laundry room.

When we weren’t in the pool we were watching soaps on Tv, some with English subtitles some without, it didn’t make much difference they were all crap. This was only interrupted with the call to prayer. It’s nice listening to it on Tv and hearing it drift over the cities from the local mosque. All the hotel rooms have a little arrow stuck on the ceiling pointing the way to Mecca so you can pray…well done Rachel for working that one out, I just thought they were emergency exit signs. To cap it all off, on the last day we saw 6 wild hornbills, the coolest looking bird in the world, hanging around in the trees outside our bungalow. We timed the trip to perfection as the day we left the resort was fully booked for the weekend. Feeling nice and relaxed we picked up a taxi and Third Gear Freddy took us to Kuantan for a bus to Melacca. Driving through one small undescript town I saw a huge 6ft sign on a café wall stating “we sell corn in a cup!”. Now who exactly is that targeted at? I guess eating corn straight off the cob is just too uncouth for some people.

Melacca is one of our favourite places so far. Great people, loads of character in a beautiful China Town and plenty of bars which have 4 hour long happy hours. They have a great evening market where they set up a karaoke stage and you can sit and watch locals butcher their favourite pop tunes all night long. We went to the usual tourists sights and pulled our best sea faring pose outside a reconstruction of the Portuguese ship 'Flora De La Mar'. We spent our first night in a restored Chinese shop house then the rest of the nights in a brand new hostel down the road. This place was so new the paint hadn’t even dried in our room and we had to sleep with the window open for fear of poisoning ourselves with paint fumes.

Capitol Satay Cafe wins the award for most interesting evening’s dinner we‘ve had so far. Health and safety would probably have a field day if this place was back home. You have a big fat gas cylinder under your table with a pot of bubbling satay sauce sat on top, in which you cook the meat and tofu skewers you’ve picked out of the fridge. If you’ve ever had the urge to cook a pigs ear in Satay Sauce, head over here…you can’t do that at Gordon Ramseys!

We moved along by bus to Singapore, an island, country and city all-in-one. On the bus I found my new stage name: Delerang Merekok. Now if that’s not an Oscar winners name I don’t know what is. It means ‘no smoking’ in Malaysian. The journey was great until we found out our bus driver had driven off and left us at the border crossing, which is something we hadn‘t really planed for. With the nearest cash point about an hours walk away things didn’t look too good for us. We decided our only option was to find a pointy stick then hang around for their afternoon service to come through and hijack it, so that’s what we did.

If you’re thinking of stopping over in Singapore, a word of warning, book your accommodation months before you get here and be prepared to spend big bucks. We tried looking weeks in advance and even then all the cheap rooms everywhere were gone. At one point it looked like our only choice was either sleeping in Raffles or on the street. Luckily just as I was starting to collect newspapers for us to sleep under we stumbled across a gem of a B&B called Lollypopcorn. Our first stop though was a cool flashpacker hostel in town, which was nice but a tad over our flimsy budget, so after a couple of nights we booked ourselves in to Lolllypopcorn for the rest of our stay. Although it has a ridiculous name it was a wicked place. Basically it’s just a flat in a huge block in an urban area of Singapore city called Ang Mo Kio. They have just 3 guest rooms, with the others being for the family who still live there, mum and dad in one room, one of the sisters in another and the maid, who sleeps in the broom cupboard! It’s a tight space, but very homely. From the flat we had a quick bus ride to the brilliant Singapore Zoo where you can get very, very close to the animals and the Night Safari next door, which has the same animals, but in the dark. The zoo has 85 scarily intelligent Baboons, who have realised that if they entertain us they will get thrown more bananas than they would do if they just sat there begging for them. So they’ve taught themselves to do handstands and summersaults, cartwheels and star jumps and a load of other things to catch the attention of the banana wielding tourists.

Back in town we went to some Galleries and Museums, like the Asian Civilisation Museum, which I think is one of the best museums in the world. We also dragged our heels around the Financial District and the Quays, which reminded us very much of Canary Wharf…we even sat outside a mock Victorian pub and had a pint of Speckled Hen. We also did the obligatory waltz down Orchard Road to look in all the shops and buy some clothes. One thing about Singapore is how unbelievably clean it all is. You expect it to be clean, because that’s what you’ve been told, but it’s still pretty impressive. Although in a city where they’ve banned Chewing Gum, 5 minutes after turning up Rachel still manages to tread in some. This didn’t really surprise us too much though as she’s done that in every other country so far, I guess it’s now become a tradition. On our last day we went down to the Orchard Road and to celebrate sticking to our 4 month budget we needlessly blew a huge amount of money on a laptop and that’s what I am writing this on now.

The Southeast Asian leg was over as we boarded a plane heading for Brisbane. One thing that puzzled me on the flight was why they gave us a plastic knife but a metal fork with our dinner?!? That’ll foil any terrorist hijack attempt don’t you think?…just as long as they don’t realise you can still stab pretty good with a fork.

On a side note, Australian passport control are brilliant, they even wash your shoe’s for you! I think it’s something to do with bringing foreign flora in to the country and effecting the fragile eco system, but as a bonus they do make them look nice and shinny. Just don’t say that out to them because I don’t think they like doing it very much. We have been in Australia for ages now. We’ve walked on the largest sand island, snorkelled on the great barrier reef and driven from Darwin all the way down to Perth, but I‘ll leave all those adventures for the next blog entry.

Photo’s at:
http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

See you all soon.

Your sincerely,

Joe n Rachel.xx