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.

 

We left Phi Phi about 10 days ago and spent one night in Patong, a beach resort in Phuket which seems to be the spring retreat for all the fat, drunk European oafs who haunt the Canary Islands during summer. Quite frankly it was horrific and we spent the night playing Thai bride bingo and counting the go-go bars (12 in one street) between drinks. Despite Thailand’s many virtues the sex industry is really, really unsavoury, and it was with a Patong flavoured bad taste in our mouths that we decided to have a little detour to Malaysia, which is proving to to be a very good decision: it’s very relaxed with a friendly multi-cultural population and an abundance of natural resources – less hectic than India but more unpredictable than Thailand.

We’ve spent the last 5 days on Pulau Perhentian, a little speck of jungle covered rock in the South China Sea with the most sublime, postcard perfect beaches I have ever seen. I know we droned on about pretty islands on the last post but in my book the Perhentians kicked Phi-Phi’s arse: hardly any development at all, perfect sea water, daily volleyball matches, incredible wildlife both in thre jungle and in the sea, and a lovely bunch of Malaysians and ex-pats running the handful of beach bars and dive shops. There’s really nothing else there – no ATMs, no speedboats in the bay, no electricity during daylight, no shops full of tat, no touts.

Annoyingly, James signed up to a PADI course and is now a qualified open water diver, while I achieved nothing beyond swimming, eating and playing volleyball badly. I was very kindly adopted by a group of English boys who, being on their gap year, were right on my maturity wavelength: had a great day with them snorkelling and jumping off lighthouses into the sea. Our snorkelling inventory: black tip sharks, barracudas, angel fish, clown fish, stingrays, sea turtles, snappers, about a million other fishies and more coral than you can shake a stick at.

We’re back to the mainland today and planning to shoot down to Singapore for a bit of sand-free civilisation before we head into the Malaysian rainforest to swing on some ropes or something (before we do that we will be collecting a large tree sloth from Kuala Lumpur airport in order to return it to its natural habitat).