Malaysia by Steve

21 - 30 Aug, Malaysia

I'm going to start this blog off with a picture that pretty much sums up what you're dealing with in South East Asia, and that is, fundamentally different taste buds.



Yes, it is what you think it is. Sweetcorn icecream. And not sold by a street vendor, but by KFC. Where it has presumably passed numerous taste tests in its route to market. I saw another similar advert in Kuala Lumpur, where a fast food chain had turned a picture of the Petronas twin towers into 2 cobs of corn.

I really liked our first stop in Malaysia, Georgetown. The city is a lovely place to walk around, and I don't say that often about cities. Every nook and cranny drips with colonial history. Little India and Chinatown give fascinating colour and vibrancy and diversity. But even lovely Georgetown can't escape the Beckhams. Kudos for Jo for getting this sneaky photo.



If you tire of the city, you could get hot and sweaty in the jungle with the 4 hour walk up Penang Hill, including, halfway up, if you needed any more of a work out than a jungle walk...a Jungle Gym!

At the top of Penang Hill are fabulous views over GT. Here we are at the top looking quite chipper considering we had spent 4 hours walking up and just been told that the Furnicular railway back down had been out of action for the last 2 months.



Melaka was our next stop. Many nations have owned Malaka at some point, tribute to its important past as a major point of trade with Europe, China, SE Asia etc. Personally, I find it much more interesting that they have big scary monitor lizards swimming around in their river.



Melaka was lizard central and here we are with Rocky the 8 year old iguana. Check out the tail and how excited Jo is to be holding it!



Here's an example of the kind of colonial influences that I liked in Georgetown, it's prevalent in Melaka also. Incidentally, this was near China Hill, the largest Chinese cemetery outside China. It's a pretty big place, so big in fact, it has it's own running club that jogs round the hill.



You can get tricycle taxis around Melaka. They're colourful and loud, as they have built in speaker systems booming out various styles of music, none of them good. Perhaps you choose one based on it playing the music you liked? Personally, I'd be a bit embarassed to be riding around town on a bike like this with Celine Dion drawing people's attention to you, but horses for courses eh.



While we were out lizard spotting, we came across a house in the oldest part of Melaka whose owners had lived there as children and were keeping it going as a museum. We sat in the chair that the King of Malaysia had sat in, and were proudly shown the marital bedroom, which looked cosy but a bit dusty.



No visit to Kuala Lumpur would be complete without a trip up the Petronas Towers. I have to say I have to really psyche myself up to get excited by tall buildings, but something about these Twin Towers really is quite staggering when you see them in the evening all lit up like rockets about to blast into space. I bought a glittery Twin Towers bottle opener that seemed like a fitting souvenir.





Being a transport planner, Jo has lots of friends who get excited by monorails. Finding postcards of the KL monorail proved impossible, so Jo's friends, you may find this picture printed out and winging its way to you as an improvised postcard.

Actually to be fair, I find monorails quite interesting too, and my trip on the Mag Lev in Shanghai was cool.

To celebrate the momentous occasion of getting our 60 day Indonesian visas, we popped into Beryl's Chocolate Kingdom and jostled with hundreds of tourists who had been bus-ed in and who, by the looks of their shopping baskets, had never seen chocolate before. We got to try some Durian fruit covered in chocolate. Durian is SE Asia's premier fruit, they love it. It smells vile and tastes, well, let's just say I was glad it was covered in chocolate. For those of you who are interested, according to Beryl's Kingdom, Switzerland eats the most chocolate.

We've experienced a lot of rain in Malaysia. It's the first bit of rain we've seen in months. In KL, it rains every day, one day it rained absolute cats and dogs for 5 hours. This was the scene as we drove into KL on the bus.

At the time of writing, 30th of August, we're going back up to Georgetown for a couple of nights then across to Indonesia. On the 31st the Malaysians are celebrating their 51st year of Independence, 'Merdeka', and so there will be lots of celebrations. We've had problems getting bus tickets because of everyone going home for the party, I don't think it will be quite Full Moon Party but it'll be interesting to see what goes down.

Full Moon Party by Steve

Although I had vaguely known that beach parties were part and parcel of Thailand, I hadn't known in much detail about the Full Moon Party until a few months ago, before our trip started. Now that we were in Ko Pha Nagn, the site of one of the biggest Full Moon Parties, had paid inflated accomodation costs and taxi fares, I was getting excited. Days spent on boat trips and by the beach or pool were perfect preparations for a potentially gruelling up-until-dawn beach party. Like Olympic athletes, we got into training by staying up later and later in the 3 days beforehand.

On the 16th, full moon night, we went out quite late, no point burning out early! When we got to Hat Rin, which was not far from ours in a taxi, it was absolutely packed. The taxi park was rammed with taxis, motorbikes lined every street. Some people were having a huge argument outside a taxi. Were they going home already? We walked through the centre of Hat Rin. Stalls lined the narrow streets selling the infamous buckets: a sandcastle bucket with a bottle of spirits and a can of soft drink mixer. Lethal.



As we got closer to the beach, we could now hear the music booming. But we could`t see anything yet. It was a struggle to get out from the narrow roads on to the beach because of the sheer volume of people. Finally we emerged to a chaotic scene of thousands of people with buckets jigging up and down to trance music blaring out of huge speakers. It was strange but utterly brilliant, a proper sight to behold. There must have been around 15,000 people on that beach, and I have heard that it gets up to 30,000 sometimes.



Time flew by. Dawn broke quickly. It was quite surreal to be stood in the sea holding a bucket of whiskey watching the sun rise over the beach. Eventually things caught up with us and at 830am we headed home. But, even then, there were still a huge group of more than 500 people on the beach dancing to the trance beats still blaring out.


Some valiant attempts to storm the beach end in tragedy

The next day was, predictably, a non starter...