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Hello all,
So since I last wrote, Tamara and I left Phi Phi Island and headed to Krabi on the mainland. We went with a friend of ours called Lee. Krabi town isn't the most exciting place in the world so we only stayed a coupe of days...
In order to make it a little more interesting, we decided to rent a Jeep and check out the countryside around Krabi.... It was all exquisitely lush and green. We spent the day just driving without purpose and ended up seeing some things that one doesn’t see simply by sightseeing...
We left Lee, Krabi and Thailand to head to Malaysia. We took three busses to get to Georgetown Penang. We decided to spend the night here as we didn’t want to take yet another bus without a break. We booked ourselves into the most remarkable hotel. It was built in the 1930's and was never updated. It had extremely high ceilings and to massive steep staircases which took us up to our room. The room was enormous and all the furniture was original. It was quite the experience staying in this hotel as you could feel the old glamour
of the hotel. It was slightly spooky! Also it was sad to think of this once glamorous hotel becoming a place for backpackers (like us) to stay in...
The following morning, we left for the Cameron Highlands. After a long bus ride, in the nicest bus we've bee on all trip (who would of thought I'd become a bus connoisseur!) we arrived in Tanah Rata where we were picked up and taken to our hotel.
The place we were staying was very cute. It had a large living area with tons of sofas where you could sit and read all day and watch the movies in the evening, which is exactly how we spent most of our time there.
Thankfully, anticipating that there would not be a whole lot to do in the highlands before arriving I had bought a massive pile of books and was hence never bored!
The Scenery of the highlands is amazing. It actually in a strange kind of way reminded me a lot of the mountains in Switzerland. I guess mountains everywhere have a similar slow pace and ambiance about them. Walking around the town I felt as though I could
be in a Swiss mountain resort where the residents had an odd love of Asian cuisine!
On our second last day there we decided that it was important that we see the tea plantations, which are the main attraction of the highlands!
We booked a tour and headed off with our guide early in the morning. We drove up the winding mountain roads with the plantations on either side going up and down into the valleys like a mist covered lush green carpet.
Our guide who was very nice explained how the tea was picked and a processed to create the drink we all love! after stopping to take some pictures (which don’t come near to capturing the beauty) we continued on to our tour of the mossy rain forest.
It was indeed mossy, but also very muddy! Tamara managed to get so muddy in fact that she was forced to throw out her running shoes and her trousers. I was secretly very happy about the latter being thrown out as they were full of holes and really ugly!
The Mossy rain forest was really beautiful and our guide told us lots of interesting facts about
the different plants, namely how they could be used to cause someone a slow and painful death! Not exactly the most useful bits of information, but nevertheless fascinating!
The following morning we left Tanah Rata for Kuala Lumpur. We spent only a couple of days In KL but really indulged ourselves. We ate at fantastic restaurants and spent most of our time walking around and enjoying the city. We also went to see the National History museum, which, although was not that interesting, did offer insight into how the nation of Malaysia developed and why there is such diversity in the people.
From KL we went to Singapore. This bus was very nice though the Air conditioning wasn’t working very well and so we were a bit uncomfortable for the journey.
We arrived in Singapore where we were staying in the best room in an awful hotel, which was across the street from the Raffles Hotel. Obviously this left us with quite a bit of hotel jealousy...
Tamara and I both loved Singapore. It is sooooo clean! We only had a couple of days there but managed to do quite a lot. We went to the
Singapore Art Museum, which had a really great show on of a Singaporean abstract expressionist artist. It was so nice to walk through this beautiful space and see some local works.
From Singapore we went to Jakarta where I am writing from... so I guess Ill leave it there for now
All the best miss you all
JC
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Panayiota
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the pictures look stunning. was starting to think you had forgotten how to post - have been checking the site and saw no news for a while. glad all is still going great, it all sounds amazing. you are making us all jealous so hurry up and come home already! miss you and your floppy hair, big kisses xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx