James dragged himself away from the technological delights of Singapore last Sunday and we took a short 6 hour bus ride back to Kuala Lumpur – what a great city. It’s bigger and grubbier than Singapore, efficient but not in a scary way, scattered with mosques, towering high-rises, temples, food halls, shrines, markets and museums, with a bit of rain forest stuck right in the middle like a really big lung for the city’s large, multi-cultural population.

We spent four days wandering around and stuffing ourselves with Chinese filth, the highlights being (apart from the food) the National Museum of Islamic Art, the city butterfly sanctuary and a surreal visit to the KL telecoms tower. The museum was showing an excellent photography exhibition – images of Islamic integration in Britain (there was one of an elderly Muslim man tending his London allotment, which is practically on a tube line, who was the first volunteer rescuer to rush down the tunnel and help victims of 7/7) – and a whole load of exhibits demystifying Islamic practises and laws. We should have a museum like that in the UK and everybody should be forced to visit at an impressionable age.

I also managed two personal triumphs in Kuala Lumpur:

a. through a combination of constructive advice, heckling and impatience, James taught me how to dive. Not scuba dive, just dive into a swimming pool. Don’t laugh, I never learnt, and 27 is better late than never.

b. I succesfully met my friend Charlie at the airport. This might seem even less impressive than the dive, but last time we tried it (in Turkey) we ended up at different airports so it was quite a triumph to see her toddle up at 7am in KL station.

For readers who are unaquainted with Charlie -  I don’t want to give the impression she’s a liability, but she is definitely an unpredictability: for example, after we took the lift up the KL telecomms tower (great view, horrendous cost), she decided to sit on a little child-sized pony and have her photo taken wearing a cowboy hat and waving a gun (Malaysian tourism at its finest). Sadly, she was upstaged by two muslim girls who turned the same trick wearing Burqas and Prada sunglasses (it was admittedly a slightly odd sight seeing the cowboy hat perched on top of a fully veiled face, but it got even odder when an old American chap wandered past and muttered to James out of the corner of his mouth ‘that’s Islam for ya…what a bunch of hopeless bastards’. I wouldn’t have minded his eccentric  xenophobia so much if he hadn’t been wearing pink nail varnish on his toenails).

The day after all this weirdness we ran away from Kuala Lumpur and headed for the Malaysian rainforest – at one hundred and thirty million years old, it’s supposed to the most ancient jungle in the world. It also has the world’s longest canopy walkway, a rope bridge that winds its way 450m through the tree tops, 50m above ground level, dozens of damp, ferny, sweaty trekking trails which kept us entertained for a couple of days and about 3 billion leeches. I came out with a couple of flesh wounds (minging, but not as bad as the one I found inching its way up my arse later on in the shower), James and Charlie were relatively unscathed.

We’ve now reached Pulau Penang, our last stop in Malaysia, and this afternoon we’re off to the border to return to Thailand. There’s a full moon party in 5 days and it seems rude not to pop by for it.