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Published: November 29th 2008
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Hindu god
Strange combination! Well in the end, we decided to fly to Malaysia & stay at Kuala Lumpur after finding cheap flights with Air Asia on the internet. So it's goodbye to Hong Kong take 2!! Our plan is to stay in Kuala Lumpur for a few days then fly to Laos. We are still hoping to get a refund from Emirates or a claim from the insurance, but both are proving a bit of a hassle. Saw a bit of the news this morning and it looks like the situation in Thailand is not getting any better. The protestors are refusing to move until the President resigns, & the President is refusing to resign so it's a vicious circle. Meanwhile the passengers in Thailand are still stuck in the airport! There are also bombs gonig off in Mumbai, India at the moment. If Michael hadn't broken his foot & we had travelled by our orignal plan, we may well have been in Mumbai just now. They say things happen for a reason & I am a firm believer in this.
Well that's us spent our first day in Kuala Lumpur & it couldn't be any more different from Hong Kong. After a
fairly bumpy ride here with Air Asia, we landed safely & were straight away greeted with a wall of heat and humidity. About 2 hours on the bus, we landed in Kuala Lumpur when the biggest thrunderstorm I ahve ever seen started. The streets quickly became like a river. It was impossible to see out the bus windows as it was literally coming down in sheets. The thunder & lightning was pretty impressive! Apparantly this is the norm here though so no-one else seemed quite as impressed as us 2. Thankfully the bus driver dropped us right outside Pondok lodge, though by the time we got our bags & ran across the road, we were soaked to the skin! Thankfully Pondok Lodge had a room for us so we didn't have to go back outside into it. Rooms here are just grand. Simple but clean, and you also get breakfast all for 60 ringgit, which is about 10 pound. A fiver each, canna complain!
After searching the internet, it looks like these rather ugly, itchy spots on me are bedbug bites. Sometimes it can take about 9 days to react so we're blaming our shoebox room in Hong Kong.
Looks like Michael got off lightly compared to me... what can I say, at least they've got taste!
The food here is a lot different from China. It's mainly curry and spices rather than noodles & dim sum. We've noticed that with Chinese food, you can eat as much as you like & not feel full, but after 1 curry here we both were stuffed. Chinese food is very healthy though, they steam everything, don't use any dairy products and drink a lot of green tea. I suppose that is how they are all so skinny & tiny!
Our first day walking around here we immediatly notice a difference from Hong Kong. It is much more humid and hotter. It is mainly Muslim religion here so we were told in the guidebook to make sure girls are covered from the knee to shoulders. However, after walking around, I notice that a lot of the girls wear shorts or skirts. So I decided that I couldn't bear the heat & put my shorts on even though my legs look like a dot to dot. I did get a lot of strange looks at my legs though, probably also because
Hindu statue
Statue protecting the Batu caves they are so white too. Sitting down on a step eating my lunch I felt like part of a side show or something. People were staring so hard at my legs when they mast by that 2 people even tripped up!
Walking around town here is an adventure in itself for our senses. The sight, sounds & smells are like nothing I've experienced before. At least here you are not mombarded every 10 steps by folk asking 'Tailor?' or 'Copy watch?', like we were in HK!
Today we went to the tower is the 4th highest in the world. The highest being the CN tower in Canada. After that we walked back down to town through a paved forest. We got the feeling that everything within the forest had big teeth! At one point we came across monkeys in the trees above us. They certainly lived up to their name by shaking tree branches so they would fall on top of us. Thankfully the missed us!!
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nsamba hussein kisiki
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dear Micheal and Laura,what an experience you have gone through! All that is adventure,all are lessons to learn beyond the ones you expected, go higher!