In Malaysia now

We have made it to Malaysia after a somewhat gruelling 12 hour journey from Railay Beach (pronounced in a long rolling, strangely Jamaican sounding accent) to Georgetown, in Penang; not nearly as long a journey as the travel time would indicate! Thai minibus transits are maybe not as efficient as you would hope.

We started to notice that things were changing as we got towards the border. Suddenly you start to see women in head scarves and adverts for Halal food giving away the fact that you are heading towards a muslim country.

At the same time we were desparately trying to spend our final Thai Baht. Our mini bus stopped for 10 minutes for lunch, which I hoped would be enough time for me to navigate the food counter. I find food counters confusing enough in the UK, but over here there are a lot more options and a lot of types of food that you would be concerned about eating. Suffice to say in my confusion I failed to react in time before a whole coach load of locals surged in front of me. I ended up getting these strange mini cornish pasty things which had some sort of vaguely sweet mincemeat type thing in them - I was hungry, they did a job.

Malaysia is very confusing. I have worked the following out so far. It may or may not be all true. The population of Malaysia is split between the native Malays who speak a version of Indonesian and are generally Muslim. The British came, initially to Penang, in about 1800 and set it up as a stop off point between Indian and China. The Chinese population immigrated after it became a British colony, and are Budhists and speak a Chinese language (sorry I am not sure what). The Indians who immigrated at a similar time who are mainly Hindus and don't speak Chinese. The overriding problem I have got at the minute is that I have no idea what language to try and murder; fortunately English appears to be a middle language that most people seem able to speak a little and in a number of cases better than me.

Right Jo has just informed me that she managed to get rice cakes at the service area and that they were very nice. Also, our cooking extravaganza in Chiang Mai has now been put up on their website at:
http://chiangmaismartcook.com/gallery.html
We are in the photos for 1st June. It is great because you can see for yourselves how much better my spring rolls were than Jo's!!!

Quickly about Penang it has a very nice fort from when the East Indian Company turned up and it is very well preserved and worth a look if you happen to be there.

Since we last wrote we have done a lot of stuff in Thailand. Possibly the most exciting of these things is go to 'James Bond Island', which disappointingly features no 007 memorabilia at all. However, it does have Scaramanga's island from the man with the golden gun, but alas no giant laser gun. Oh and it was also really pretty and we got to canoe in the mangrove forest and stuff. Hopefully the pictures are good.

We have been to the Phi Phi islands, where The Beach was filmed. On the beach in question it was very, very, very busy, despite the fact that you had to get there by boat. It is very pretty. All of the islands are limestone outcroppings in the sea, with thick vegetation on top. We went on a days boat trip which took in a number of the beautiful beaches and just anchored off the coast and you just swam to the beach for an hour, or went snorkling. It was one of my favourite days so far.

Surely it is Jo's turn to add some information. I will try and add some photos!!! By the way we went diving again in Phi Phi and got some underwater photos taken, so I will add some of those too. These photos are not from the disposable camera purchased by Jo, as on closer inspection it could not withstand pressures below 5 metres, which in diving terms means that it is bobbins; however we did take it snorkling so it may yet turn up trumps.

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