Malaysia

The first real stop in Malaysia, besides transit towns, was Melaka. This is the "square" which tourists congregated to take pictures, dodge vender's, and ride in flowered rik-shaws. We did the first two of those. We liked Melaka for its friendly, historical atmosphere. It was also from here we found out that we could hop over to Indonesia... so we did thanks to Nora and Nathan who loured us over .


A month later, we are back in Malaysia, Penang. This is one of the few picture we took of our time here... it was a bit of a culture shock coming back from Indonesia to tourist central that is Georgetown (and we were not sure we were feeling it). We stayed too long here and the only thing we really enjoyed was the food, which was amazing. It was here where we also saw our second dead tourist. We did try to do some sight seeing, but it just wasn't working out for us, so we saw a couple movies instead....we know how sad that is.
Lovers lane was home to many "lady boy" bars. We went from Penang, which is an island on the west coast, straight across to the Perhentians Islands on the east coast in time for Emma's B-day.

Our little oasis was Mira beach, which had only one resort...which wasn't really a resort as apposed to huts/bungalows. It was amazingly quiet and relaxing. The snorkeling was amazing, with reef sharks, turtles, stingrays (which were green with brilliant blue spots), tons of fish and a wide variety of coral. We had a nice trek to other beaches for food and mango shakes. At night it was card games and thoughts of beer.



This is our little bungalow, which was in the shade allowing us to sleep in as late as we wanted.


This is probably the best picture we have taken underwater so far... so it had to go on the site.


We made regular excursions from our beach in search of better food. We took a boat over to the big island and found an amazing little restaurant that had the most amazing mango shakes! This is one of the beaches from the big island called turtle bay. We saw two turtles here.


These little buggers littered the trails at night and were hell if stepped on. Three heads and six sets of pincher's were pulled out with tweezers from Emma's foot. Apparently they are used for some kind of ceremony where the people put their hands in a glove full of them. From experience we can say that that would hurt like... a mo fo.

We moved from the Perhentians towards Tamen Negara national park. We spent three days trekking in search of wild life. We trekked 7 hours into the jungle to a hide where we spent the night. Unfortunately, there was a thunder storm and 6 loud people at the hide as well.

The first day at the park we did the Canopy walk, which was cool, very high and a little sketchy.


On our long trek out to the hide we saw numerous droppings from the elephants and a couple footprints... we were very excited.


Just when we were about to give up on finding the river crossing (having heard numerous streams that we were hoping was it) we arrived. We were informed that there was a raft for the crossing, but as you can see, there was no raft.



This is the only "wildlife" we saw for our three days effort.

We headed to Kuala Lumpur where we pissed about in the city for a while. We saw the Batu Caves temple which was interesting. The steps were numerous and the day hot. Inside the cave was cooler and filled with Hindu statues and monkeys.

This Mosque reminded us of "Its a small world" because it was light up with tons of little lights and surrounded by water. It was a very pretty sight.

We went to the national mosque, but found the restrooms outside it more entertaining.

We loved the Petronas Towers. They were unlike anything we have seen, and we went almost every night to see them light up.

The free trip up to the sky bridge was well worth it. The view of the city was great and the air conditioning wonderful.

Overview:

So we made it back to Malaysia after our side track adventure in Sumatra and realized that the peninsula was going to be our first SE Asia round-about. We left from the south and returned from the north and just had to find out about the creamy filling. We discovered the magic of Chicken and Rice for breakfast in Penang, the crystal waters of the Perhentian Islands, the leach tracks of Tamen Negara National Park and the organized chaos that is Kuala Lumpur. From crazy bus drivers to the tranquil train rides, Malaysia really has everything to offer weary traveler. We met and traveled with some really amazing people. Daniel (again), Moroline, Pat, Dieter, Gavin, Hana and Tessa thanks for the smiles and the motivation to keep walking to Coral Bay for the great roti canai! Malaysia was kind to us and we enjoyed being here. Stay tuned for Thailand.