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Published: March 30th 2009
Well Kuala Lumpur was hot, dam hot, hotter than a rattlesnakes tail! Hot and wet, as Adrian Kronhour once said.."which is good when your with a woman, but not when you're in the jungle" or concrete jungle as it were. 10 minutes out in the open and you sweat so much you look like you've jumped in the pool hot! Ok so you get the picture.
As soon as we arrived we set off in search of the famous Petronas Towers, which weren't hard to find as they can be seen from almost everywhere in the city. These were absolutley amazing to see, especially at night all lit up. We're not generally that impressed with buildings but these were just awsome. At the base of them people were laying down on the concrete trying to get some pictures, how silly we thought, for around 5 minutes before we joined them!
The mall underneath the towers was also pretty good with good old home comforts like Marks and Spencers and Topshop. We had a nice guesthouse (the Reggae Guesthouse) right in the heart of China Town and things were generally looking pretty good.
After having a fantastic time in
both Hong Kong and Bangkok, we expected big things from the Malaysian capital but unfortunatly it just didn't cut it. The problem we had was its was difficult to walk around because of the humidity and heat. We did attempt to see the parks one day but after half an hour we had to flee to the aircon'd comfort of the nearest mall, and so it went.
We spent the next 3 days wandering around the biggest malls in Asia, thre were so many of them. Now im not the biggest shopping fan to begin with but after 3 days of it I was so ready for a change. And it was 5 pound a pint so we couldn't even enjoy our favourite pass time when there's not much else to do! We did manage to get a bit of culture in though, and even got to a gig one night..kind of.
After returning to the towers the next day and doing the sky bridge walk between them, we noticed an advert for the Malaysian Philamonic Orchestra House next to the towers. There was a special promotion on that night, 10 ringit (2 pounds). The problem was there
Chinatown
Jonker walkwas a strict dress code, no flippers, shorts, jeans or sports shoes, in itherwords no scruffy backpaker types!
Well, not letting this stand in our way we did a quick visit back to China town, had our hair chopped and got kitted out for a night at the Philamonic! Steve even managed to get some trousers for 2 pounds 80 pence.
The concert was really good, various sections of the orchestra came out seperatly and played for around half an hour each, we were well happy that we made the effort, sat in our "royal" box, stage right. We did get some photos but unfortunatly were caught by a guard who made us promptly delete haha.
Not much else to report from KL unfortunatly. I think we would have a better impression if came at a cooler time of year but apparently there isn't one, so we wont be back.
The next stop, Melaka, was a couple of hours South on our way to Singapore. Melaka is a historic city being of strategic important in colonial times (and religious importance before then) and has been under the control of the Portugese, the Dutch and finally the
The Church
...at Dutch square British, before they left. Its was a really nice change from KL. Our guesthouse was located in the old town which was a cool mix of small indian, chinese and malay streets with period mediteranian buildings making up the scenery.
We spent a nice couple of days wandering around and took a hop-on/hop-off tourist bus intending to see the main historic attractions around the larger city area. Well this started off ok at the Dutch Fort but after an hour and a half of waiting for the next bus to hop-on (apparently they should run every half hour), we gave up and had to get a taxi.
We'd arranged a couch surfing host for 3 nights in Singapore which we were really looking forward to and the day before we were due to leave Steve was checking the tickets online and planning to book somewhere for our first night in Australia. Then something scarey happened! "Er Maja, it says here that we're flying to Australia today!". Arghhhhhhh! At first we thought Quantas had brought the flight forward by 3 days but then we checked our tickets in the bags and realised we'd made a major cock up!
For the past 5 months we've said to everyone that we're going to Oz at the end of March so somehow this got stuck in our minds that we were leaving on March 31st and we never bothered to check, ontil the morning of the flight..thank god!
Anyway we threw our stuff in the bags and frantically ran down to the bus station to see if we could get there in time. As it happenned we'd just made the bus and 4 hours later were relieved to be in Singapore enjoying a Coke and waiting for the tube to the airport..panic over.
So we got to see Singapore for all of 10 minutes and from what little we saw we think we'd have had a nice 3 days there. Kind of ironic when we were bored in KL for 4 nights thinking we were stuck killing time waiting for our flight to Australia!
So after 18 weeks we left Asia behind for Australia, and wow what a country this is. We've been in Cairns now for a couple of night and already have fallen in love with the place! We had planned to spend 6 weeks here
but with a bit of luck we'll be able to find a job and spend 6 months here instead...I mean come on, tomorrow we're off on a sailing boat diving on the great barrier reef! 😊
Hope you're all well!
Bye for now, love Maja and Steve x
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Ma
non-member comment
Hello from Shelf
Hiya, fab pictures as usual. Nice hair cut Maja, you look fantastic. You both look so well. Blimey what about your near miss - I did something similar when I went on a holiday to Jersey with the girls. It's really scarey isn't it. So glad luck was on your side and you made it to Australia which sounds great from what you've seen so far. Good luck with the long journey ahead - BE CAREFUL! xx