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Published: June 28th 2006
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So from Singapore we headed up to Malaysia with Kuala Lumpur as our first stop. We had booked a hotel in Little India which was nice and just a short walk from the metro into the city centre.
As Jemma's camera has officially died we headed to the KLCC, the shopping mall at the Petronas Tower to have a look for one. Eventually she got a pretty good deal on a Fuji camera so we were ready to start snapping!
We headed out the mall at the Petronas end and were amazed by the towers. So many things we've seen so far on this trip we'd only ever seen before in pictures and movies - but it's so different to actually be there. Although unfortunately Sean Connery wasn't swinging from the bridge like in Entrapment!!
Off in the other direction we could see the KL tower (skytower) which is actually the fourth tallest in the world - and we've done a few of the others in the top ten towers now! As it was starting to get a bit late for sightseeing we decided to head home to get ready for a night out, well the footie was
on and we'd heard it would be played on a big screen at a club called the Beach club. We headed to dinner first at Legends just around the corner from the Beach Club, after we'd stuffed ourselves and watched the Germany game (boo) we headed for some drinks in the beach club. We sat down for an hour or so then headed to the dancefloor, schoolboy error! Within 10 seconds of standing up B.A Barracus and his even larger brother started attempting to chat us up. Given they were from Cameroon and Jemma can't understand anyone north of Watford this didn't go down too well so we said "just going to the bar", yeah right see ya later!! So we moved down the club to escape the A-Team but again we were jumped on, and I thought men in Croydon were annoying!!
After about an hour of politely trying to get rid of sweaty fellas and with one seemingly stalking me around the club we gave up and sat outside by the big screen waiting for the England game to start, which the doormen had promised would be shown. As the line up etc were being shown it
got quite busy with people waiting for England vs. Sweden to kick off. Then, just as the whistle was blown, the screen went dead and all we could hear was someting about Owen crawling off. I went ranting to the barstaff who said they were closing, lying scumbags had kept us in the sweatpit all night and had no intention of staying open for the game. Well as they were gonna do us over we thought we'd repay the favour by leaving without paying for our last round of drinks and jumped in a cab to find the footie. We ended up in a crowded Malay restaurant/cafe that had a big screen with everyone watching. We squeezed in amongst everyone and quickly became noticed as the only English girls in there and loud, shouting girls at that. The Malaysians seemed quite amused by us and the majority were cheering on England too which was a result. Obviously the result wasn't fantastic but we enjoyed the atmosphere we watched it in, so different from Sutton, there wasn't even any punch ups!!
The next day we headed back to the Petronas towers and took a few more pics, then headed to
the skytower. We weren't able to get up to the connecting bridge on Petronas as the tickets had sold out at about 8am but to be honest I can't imagine the view would be that impressive in comparison to the skytower. From the skytower we had a view over the whole of Kuala Lumpur from a height of around 150m. We could see the Petronas tower, the Batu caves and lots of other buildings we didn't recognise!! Afterwards Gina and I got our portrait done in the lobby. Pretty good considering it only took him about 10 minutes to do each, although I personally think he's aged me about 10 years!! We headed for lunch back to Legends where we met the manager Jerry who was an English guy that had just recently opened the place. He and his fiance were both lovely as was the food, compliments to the chef once again!
After Kuala Lumpur we moved onto Taman Negara, a Malaysian National Park and one of the oldest rainforests in the world. It took about 4 hours drive from KL to the dock where we were informed we would get the "ferry" to park headquarters. The 2
hour ride on the ferry, a large motorised kayak, was pretty cool. We saw water buffalo, kingfishers, deer and monkeys along the river. When we arrived at our stop we headed to check out the hostels, the first one which lonely planet had made sound okay was an absolute dive so far as a bathroom goes. I'm not a snob at all but a metal kitchen sink and a leaking toilet is just too much!! We eventually found a nicer place further up the hill so settled in before walking down to the river to have dinner on one of the floating restaurants. Due to it being a rainforest we had expected it to rain so we donned our attractive pac-a-mac's and headed down prepared. Unfortunately we, well specifically I, hadn't prepared for the fact that darkness, rain and rivers tend to equal frogs and lots of them. The walk home in the pouring rain and darkness, where the only thing to be seen were frogs on the steps ahead, was all too much for me. As I plucked up the courage to run past I leapt up the steps, tripped and whacked my toe - 'self harm girl' strikes
again!
The next day we headed out on an expedition of the rainforest. We did a short trail on the other side of the river that led to the canopy walkway. As the name suggests it gives you the chance to walk through the canaopy of the rainforest suspended 40 m off the ground. It gave excellent views and a very different perspective of the jungle, although unfortunately we didn't see any monkeys. It was a good job none of us are scared of heights as i think the planks of wood resting on a ladder and suspended from the tops of the jungle would probably scare some people! After that we headed back to the HQ where we'd booked a Shooting Rapids ride, given there wasn't a rafting trip this seemed like the next best option. On a smaller power kayak we headed through the rapids and were all a bit dissapointed that we were't getting very wet. Then I clocked that the shooting part came on the way back when we were travelling in the direction of the current. No more complaints about getting wet we were soaked from head to toe, muchas fun!!
When we
finished our ride and returned to the jetty I think we scared quite a few Japanese tourists who were looking at us as if to say, "Oh my god we are gonna fall out the boat look at those girls, they're soaked!" After that we figured we may aswell go for a swim as we were so wet anyway, so we followed the signs for the swimming hole which we naively expected to be a kind of spring with nice clear water. We were wrong it was just a part of the river where you could swim and once we'd chatted to an Irish guy who was swimming and saw the blood tricking down his leg from the leeches we decided against it! We headed back to camp, slightly paranoid about a) leeches and b) the loud growling coming from the jungle. Gina on several occasions told me to "hurry up as there's a big lion or something growling in this bloo*y bush!". Me and Jem found this quite amusing until about 5 metres ahead of us a massive, angry wild boar went scrambling across the path ahead of us with its teeth out. We weren't laughing then! We saw
some more people approaching and walking past the boar we calmed down realising we were not going to be eaten like we had feared!
That night we again headed out for dinner aware that we would have to face the frog run home again. Dinner was nice apart from the rat running along the shelf above us. We got out of there sharpish and headed home with me singing "my favourite things" from Sound of music to try and prevent myself from hyperventilating!
New photos have been added to Dead Calm!
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Well look at you trying to be a jungle trekker too!!! bet you didn't get bitten as many times as i did!!!!! Love the piccies of KL and towers, looks amazing, did you have CZJ moment? : ) Can't wait to see you when you back!! xx