Sorry for the delay.. The rest of asia: Thailand pt. 4 and Malaysia pt. 2

Well, there's a bit of catching up to do. After a good start to the blog "we've" ;) not got around to updating it as much as could be done...

Anyway, I'll just summarise what we've been upto, to bring us upto date with where we are today, Airlie Beach in Queensland, Australia.

So...

Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui

After leaving Krabi we endured another typical long Thai bus journey, with endless changes of bus, getting off at various locations for "only 5 minets mistar" which usually turns out to be 2 hours at some shack of a restaurant in the middle of nowhere where they sell cans of warm coke and day old noodles for twice the normal going rate.

We eventually reached our destination of Ko Pha Ngan after a further 4 hour boat journey at about 10pm, arriving in the port of Than Sedat to be greeting by the usual throng of taxi drivers and hotel touts. Heads down and determined we pushed through (we'd had some practice of this by now) to the big row of pickup trucks which serve as the local buses and jumped in the back to be joined by a group of gung-ho american college boys who'd been drinking non-stop for the last 18 hours and were making plenty of noise, hanging out the back of the moving truck and singing along to "one night in bangkok" on their portable radio.

Once on the other side of the island I took Kasia on a mystery tour along a dark beach to find the bungalows I'd stopped in 4 1/2 years ago. "It's just around the next corner, I'm sure!" :D
Well, it appeared it wasn't, and the 3 quid a night place had been replaced by a new ClubMed style resort full of our friends from the pick-up truck.. Seems the place has changed somewhat..

Anyway, our stay here consisted of getting sunburnt on the beach, getting very drunk at the full-moon party, being very hungover the day or two after the fullmoon party, clearing the bathroom of spiders so Kasia would agree to go into the shower and eating. Not bad in all...

Once the hangover had cleared, we took the short ferry ride over to Ko Samui where we stayed just one night as we had to travel back down to Malaysia since Kasia's visa was due to expire. We managed to squeeze alot into these 24hrs, renting a moped and doing a tour of the island. This included a climb upto a couple of waterfalls, a visit to a temple with it's own mummified monk, some elephants, a local fairground and the impressive big buddha temple.

This stay was followed by a ferry back over to the mainland and a terrifying mini bus ride down to Hat Yai, about 120km north of the Thai/Malaysian border. It may have been cheap, but being cramped into the back corner of a Toyota van with no leg room and 15 other people, flying down the winding thai 'highways' at 160km/h in the dark, dodging cows and mopeds wasn't much fun. :o/

Anyway, we made it unschathed to Hat Yai and checked into a seedy hotel for the night after some local woman with a particularly bad body odour problem had hyjacked the minibus at the bus station after screaming out 'you look for otel??'. It was the middle of the night, in some dark industrial area, and we hadn't much of an alternate plan so decided to go with her. (If she did start something, I figured we could easily have pinned the 4ft6 wench down with Kasia's rucksack :) )

Back into Malaysia

The next morning after being quoted about 10 pounds to get a bus over the border, we strolled over the road to the train station to get two train tickets for about 40p each for the journey south. Mind you, the train did stop about 20 times en route and we didn't have a seat for the first 2 hours. It was a great trip though, travelling local style and we had conversations with the odd buddhist monk and bank clerk along the way.

We reached the border town of Padang Besar late in the afternoon to be greeted by rain and a mob of moped taxis waiting to take us over to the other side. Me being stubborn as ever decided we would walk the 500m (as quoted in the guidebook) to the frontier, saving 2 pounds in the process. However, yet again my estimations seemed to be a little low and 2km later we could finally see the signs for Malaysia in the distance.

As I mentioned, it was getting quite wet by this point and as we found out, flipflops and wet oily floors don't exaclty result in the grippiest of combinations... Kasia, fully loaded with rucksacks went down like a sack of spuds with a crack, landing like a turtle that had been flipped upside down.

From the look on her face, I expected the worse, praying she'd not cracked a hip or broken an arm. Luckily though, she just seemed to have a painful wrist and sore oily arse and hands with a few grazes. We got her up and brushed down then limped onto the border crossing where we managed (after some time) to get a taxi to Kota Bharu and made our first (and luckily) final visit to an asian hospital, learning happily that she'd only sprained her wrist. Kasia did persude the doctor to give her a bag of pain killers and anti-biotics though, just in case ;) )

Kota Bharu is about as islamic as it gets in Malaysia (they even had the Koran being read out over the PA in PizzaHut!!). It is also the place where the Japanese first invaded Malaysia in World War II. There are a few museums, a huge mosque and a stomach churning market displaying all manner of meat covered in flies. Unfortunately, as we found out, alot of the attractions were closed most of the day due to Ramadam and two days was enough before we woke up the chinese guesthouse owner at 4.30am to take us to the train station to catch the world famous
"Jungle Train" which would take us south for 18 hours to a place called Gemas, winding through the mountainous and dense jungle regions of the Malaysian Peninsuala. It was actually quite a scenic journey, but we'd missed out on breakfast and in the sweltering heat of the 50 year old train carriage, the only thing we'd get to eat or drink was warm cans of coke and crisps. The combination of this and "oh, there's some more jungle", "oh, there's another dead cow" and more decisively, a little incident involving smoke, the stench of burning electrical wires and the only oher white person on the train, a stocky italian lad fleeing for his life to the next carriage made us to decide to ditch the train at the next station and get a bus to Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur

The capital city of Malaysia is one of huge contrast. Some of the biggest, flashest sky scrapers, shopping malls (even some of the streets outside were air-conditioned!!) and one street away, there's run down buildings, broken up roads and open sewers. We had a fun couple of days there, seeing the sights, going up the 452m Petronas Towers (only to the 45th floor unfortunately :( ), walking through parks, old colonial buildings, mosques and chinatown. We thought about going to one of the swanky outdoor (air-conditioned of course) afterwork bar parties, but the 10 pound entry fee and ridiculously priced drinks put us off.

From here we got a bus south to the city of Melacca (There are some pics of KL in Kasia's entry above)..

Melacca

I really quite enjoyed Melacca. The place was originally invaded by the portuguese in 1511 (there is still a portuguese community today), it was then taken over by the dutch a couple of hundred years later, before the British "took care" of the place whilst Napoleon was in control of the Netherlands. As a result, there are remnants of each era including a couple of fortress ruins & churches, plenty of other attractions including a great maritime museum built inside a replica Portuguese gallion.

Other highlights were a chinese festival featuring the "world famous guiness book of records kung fu master", ken, who could pierce a coconut with his little finger; an evening trip to the portuguese settlement (where we ate fresh spicy crab and prawns only to find out that we didn't have enough money for the bill and had to walk the 5km back to the guesthouse in the dark) and finally spectating a karaoke contest in the local chinese temple.








End of asia

This was pretty much the end of our asian adventure. From here we travelled straight back to Singapore in (finally) a nice leisurely driven luxury coach and straight onto the airport for our 7 hour flight onto Sydney.

to be continued..