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Published: January 21st 2007
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My last blog from Asia!
We have spent the last couple of weeks in Malaysia. I think I ended my last blog just as we had arrived in Kota Bharu. Our main purpose there was to find the house where Tom's mum had been born when his grandfather was District Officer there. We arrived in Kota Bharu late afternoon and ended up in a hotel with a concrete cell style room to stay in for the night. We were pretty tired and collapsed in the lounge area for the evening to watch King Kong. Unfortunately Tom realised that sitting on the sofa led to being bitten by some unidentified creatures, as did putting our feet on the carpet so we relaxed in uncomfortable wooden chairs with our feet up. The next day we took a bus to Kuala Besut and when we arrived had a bit of a search trying to locate a taxi driver who spoke english and who understood where we wanted to go. Eventually we stumbled across a cafe owner who understood what we were on about and he managed to communicate this to the taxi driver. We eventually found the right house which is now a
nursery. We wandered around the outside until one of the teachers opened the door and invited us in, im not sure they were completely sure about why we were there but we had a look round until we thought we'd disrupted the lessons enough. On our way out there were several little girls peeking through the windows and looking away everytime we waved. The house was big and airy with some beautiful designs around the windows. After we arrived back in Kuala Besut we went down to the seafront where it was blowing a gale but like true British we sat there and had our coffee and dinner. We splashed out on a proper meal, unfortunately when it arrived the fish was raw and still frozen in parts and so our most expensive meal yet was fed to a little cat who'd befriended us.
After Kota Bharu we headed to the Cameron Highlands and stayed in a town called Thana Rata. It was a small highlands town mostly catering for tourists with souvenir shops and loads of restaurants. The Cameron Highlands was originally a British Hill Station, which is now reflected in the housing there with huge appartment blocks
decked out in old Tudor style. The weather also seemed truely British with grey skies and drizzley rain every day we were there, however that didnt stop us walking miles and visiting a tea plantation, a butterfly farm and a couple of strawberry farms. Sungai Palas Boh Tes Estate is the home of Boh tea. It was a couple of kilometres walk from the road along the side of a hill from which the views of the estate were stunning with rows of tea plants covering the hills in all directions. The butterfly farm had loads of huge brighly coloured butterflys flying around and on bushes and it also had some very large beetles, snakes, lizards and spiders. We got chatting to the guy looking after them all who then proceeded to open all the cages as we wandered around with him and hand us creature after creature to hold, occasionally wandering off while we were left holding a snake or giant beetle. On our last day in the Highlands we walked to the Old Smokehouse Inn which id seen on a previous walk and was intrigued by. It was an old Tudor style pub with a gorgeous little english
country garden attached. We went in to find that the interior matched the outside and wouldnt have looked out of place in any old English pub at home. After several months away it was a reminder of home so we treated ourselves to Devonshire Cream Teas while looking at the rain out of the window (unfortuately it was quite an expensive reminder costing twice the price of our guesthouse room).
Next was Malaka, which should have been a short journey away, however due to our own stupidity it ended up taking the whole day as we bought bus tickets for 12.45am rather than 12.45pm. Although the lady at the bus station didnt point this mistake out to us, maybe she thought we'd be happy settling down in front of her desk for 12 hours. By the time 12.45 had come and gone without a bus and we realised our mistake all the buses had left and we didnt manage to get another one until late that afternoon and although Ipoh bus station is quite pleasant its not somewhere you want to spend a whole day, especially as all the buses are announced by ticket sellers in very loud voices
- KL,KL,KL,KL,KL, Kuuuuuala Luuumpuuuur! in your ear for several hours straight can begin to grate.
Malaka is a nice town though with very large, air conditioned shoping centres where i have more than made up for 4 months without shopping. There are also lots of museums, including the Maritime Museum which is housed in a reproduction of an old Dutch Boat, which i found quite exciting. Maybe thats just me. I also managed to get Tom round the Heritage, Ethnography and Literature Museums all of which had some quite impressive displays. We also visited the ruins of St Pauls Church, which was built in 1521 by a Portugese captain and is on a hill looking over Malaka. The rest of our time was spent searching out air-con for some relief from the incredible heat.
And so to Kuala Lumpur and my last city before I head home. Thanks to a great Christmas present from my wonderful nana we are staying in an amazing hotel right opposite the Petronas Towers, five stars with every luxury i have missed for the last 4 months and a few more that i wasnt even aware of (pillow menus?). KL is probably the
cleanest city we have visited with mostly spotless streets and a sparkling KLT (we saw a couple of women polishing the escalators leading down to the LRT station). As we are right opposite the Petronas Towers, we are dangerously near to the Suria KLCC shopping centre - 5 floors of air consitioned bliss, well for me, i think Tom stopped enjoying it on about the 12th visit. I have managed to drag myself away long enough to visit China town, a hustling, crowded area of the ciy packed with stalls selling counterfeit bags, wallets, DVDs, CDs, watches, most things actually. Central Market in China Town is meant to be the place to go for genuine Malaysian arts and crafts which disappointly turned out to be full of cheap, Chinese made tat. After all this we thought we'd better try and do something cultural and headed to the National Museum, which bizarrely was just a bigger version of all the other museums in Malaysia with dioramas showing a wedding ceremony, a few costumes and a model house. We wandered around the Lake Gardens but the other thing about KL is the incredible heat which just saps you so we decided to
make the most of the swimming pool (with hydrotherapy jets!) and air con at the hotel so that was our cultural outing over.
And thats it really, my trip is almost over. I start my mammoth trip back to England tomorrow to get a job and all that. Well maybe, theres still more of Asia to see and Tom says New Zealand is pretty incredible...
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