Maylasia

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Will recap on Maylasia, though memory may be a little scratchy as we arrived a month ago.
Flew into island of Penang, and found a little hostel in Georgetown. The first thing that struck us about this place was how amazingly friendly the people were. Of course, we have always found the peopel in Asia to be very lovely, friendly and helpful, but in penang, it seemed even more so. People would stop us on the street to have a chat...in Thailand, this normally means it is going to lead to a attempted sale of something at the end of the conversation so we were waiting for it in Penang...but it never came! people were just genuinly curious about who we were and where we came from.

Met a Indian local who had a cafe called Jims place...had to laugh at this guy, his cafe had sayings on the wall such as "a wank in the morning is better than meditation' and " a marriage lasts a thousand days' . During our tiem there he proceeded to explain to us how he was writing a karma sutra type book that is mean to cure all illnesses, from colds to cancer, and told us all about his girlfriends he had . Mind you this guy was 60, so I think he must be very fiesty for his age!

The food in penang was amazing, the city is a mixture of Malay, Chinese and Indian people and cultures. Where else in the world could you find a mosque, Hindu church and Chinese temple within 100 metres of each other? Very diverse.

We also met some great travellers here, and carried on traveling with them to the Cameron Highlands. The Cameron Highlands cool mountainous weather was a big change from the hot and humidity of Penang.
Our first day Andrew and i took one of the many local jungle trails to do a rainforest walk. I must say , attempting this in thongs was a very ammature thing to do , we struggle at times! We were on the trail and didn't see anyone else for a few hours....it was a little concerning the trail we though we were on was not following the direction of the map we had...but we made it out ok.
The next day we hired a motorbike and went driving up in the mountains. These highlands are famous for there tea plantations and strawberries (freshly picked strawberries and cream..yum..not very asian, but delicious all the same!)
The tea plantations were absolutely stunning, made for a amazing landscape, I loved it here. Stopped off a few plantations for some local tea. (once again, we lost the photos 😞 So will get them up if we cna recover them)

Next we were onto Paulu Pangkor, which is a small island off the west coast of Maylasia. Very sleepy island, not many tourists and not built up at all. Shame about the rubbish that washed up on the beach everyday. Here we were again meeting up with our old traveling friends from the Highlands, and we had a bonfire on the beach party, and all went swimming. In the water was amazing glow in the dark plankton, I had seen this when doing my night scuba diving the year before at 20m below, but never on the surface. It was amazing...you could wave your hand through the water and it looked like you had waved a magic wand with fariy dust coming off the end. When someone swam underwater, the area around them glowed and lit up. It was a new experience for me and I was absolutely in awe of this amazing natural phenomenon!

Next onto Kuala Lumper...the food to die for , we ate so many servings of duck, pork and noodles that I know am going to have to go on a diet when i get home lol. Went up the sky tower (scary for someone like me who does not like heights, im such a wuss!) and saw the Petronas twin towers, the tallest twin towers in the world.

Off to Borneo next!

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