Singapore and Malaysia

Hey all, sorry for leaving the blog so long again!  After Cairns we flew back to Sydney for a few days, whilst we were there we went to Palm beach AKA Home and Away beach!  Was awesome, even got to see some filming take place and have photos taken with some of the cast and outside the surfclub...very cool!

On the 22nd we flew to Singapore.  We arrived there we had no idea where our hostel was and even though it was very late it was absolutely boiling hot!! With sweat pumping from us we searched the streets of Singapore (well one or two) and eventually found someone who was kind enough to give us directions to the Fernloft Eastcoast Hostel.  At the hostel we quickly realised how different things were going to be from back home and Australia.  First, we had to take our shoes off before we entered, this wasnt an easy task considering we had massive boots on sticky feet and our heavy bags on our backs still.  Secondly, the whole hostel shared one toilet and the shower was the toilet!  As in, hooked up on the wall of the toilet.  Thirdly, men and women had to sleep in seperate dorm rooms.

The first thing that hit us was the incredibly pungent smell!

The next day we got up early and took a bus to Bedok MRT (Mass rail transport) station.  Here we found our first hawker center, which is a court full of stalls selling different types of food and drinks, such as chicken feet soup and pigs organ noodles.  We stuck to wanton noodle soup, but James did try the grass jelly drink which was like drinking jelly fish tenticles!  The food was pretty good but we were struggling with the chopsticks a bit, (we're experts now), so a lady took pity on me and gave me a plastic folk heheh.  After the meal we took a train and bus ride to Bukit Timah to hike through the rainforest.  This was such an incredible experience, apart from all the tropical plants we also saw a troop of macaque monkeys playing boistrously at the summit, plantain squirrels, a mimic bird (which is rare to see), a huge spider with a web that spanned the width of the trail, but the best part was when James freaked because he thought he could see a snake, then I freaked when he pointed it out to me, only for us to realise it was a huge monitor lizzard forraging for food in the undergrowth.  We slowly approached it and managed to get pretty close up and take some good pics.

That evening, pleased but tired from our days trecking we headed to Georges bar under our hostel.  Didnt really have much to drink though, the price of beer there was enough to sober anybody...S$10 (aprox 5 pounds) for a small bottle of Carlsberg!  After our second night in Fernloft Eastcoast we headed accross town to China town ready for the Chinese new year celebrations!

Chinatown was a whole new experience in itself.  The first thing that hit us was the incredibly pungent smell!  Not knowing what it was we assume it was the garbage or the sewers only to find out the smell was produced by a local favourite, the durian fruit!  A large spiky green, foul smelling fruit that neither of us had the guts (literally) to try.  The second thing we noticed was the spitting!  Every where we went elderly men were hocking up their phlem and spitting it on the floor in front of us!  We weren't sure if it was an insult but was reassured that it was a common thing for chinese people to do.  Thirdly was the large amount of people who swamed the market places on the hunt for food, trinkets and decorations in preparation for the new year celebrations.

The Chinese lunar new year's eve took place on the 25th January.  The main road in Chinatown was blocked off with a stage set up for the main show.  We were told the celebrations started at 5pm so headed to the road at around 4pm to get a prime view at the front of the barriers....at 10pm we were still there, James desperate for the toilet after a few beers, with a huge crowd around seven/eight people deep behind us!  There was no way we were going any where after waiting all that time!  Luckily we had a crazy asian guy called "Mr National day parade"  to entertain us with stories of the 43 consecutive parade days he had been to, along with plenty of photos and the entire contents of his wallet!  At 10:30 the show finally began.  There was a dragon dance, martial arts, traditional chinese dancing from different eras, singers and bands and some crazy game show that we could barely follow. Inbetween were live video links to China.  At the stroke of midnight extremely loud firecrackers and fireworks were set off, hundreds of lantern style balloons were released and floated into the night sky, and the crowd was showered in red confetti and shouts of Gong Xi fai Cai (Happy new year) could be heard all around.

The following day we decided to visit Sentosa Island, a sort of amusement park on a small island south of Singapore.  It turns out we chose the busiest day of the year! Chinese new year's day.  Even getting to the island was near impossible with queues two hours long to get on the bus.  We managed to get a taxi which then got stuck in a traffic jam and had to drop us off pretty far from where we needed to be.  We then waited in another queue for ages for a shuttle bus before finally arriving at the island.  Unfortunately we didnt get to experience much of the island because the queues were so long and tickets had run out for the shows.  We did get to ride on the sky lift which took us to the peak of the island where we then waited in yet another queue before riding the luge, discribed as "half toboggan, half go kart," back down.  We also sat on the beach for a bit where we saw an unexpected firework display.  Suprise, suprise there was another huge queue to leave the island, this queue was manic, seemingly full of confusion and difficult to navigate.  Hitting the sack that night was a huge relief!

On the 27th we caught a suprisingly comfortable and spacious bus for four hours to Melaka AKA Malacca in Malaysia.  After some unsuccessful haggling at  Melaka Sentral  we managed to get a taxi to Ringo's Foyer Guest House (which had an infestation of ants in the toilet/shower room).  There we were met by Howard, the very enthusiatic manager of the guest house who seemed very interested in James!  He did however have some good advice on where to visit in Melaka for good food and entertainment all centred around and on a street called Jonkers Walk, 200m from our hostel in China Town.  This street was pretty funky and hectic, with market stalls on either side, not much of a pavement  and plenty of people which meant most of the time we were forced to walk on the road.  Whilst we were exploring this street and the surrounding area we saw our first trishaws!  This can only be described as a bicycle with a seat attached, these particular ones had were decorated with lots of pretty coloured flowers and ornaments.  The thing we loved the most about the trisaws were some were blaring out crazy trance tunes, hip hop and Michael Jackson!  The one we got though had some kind of hindu music which evoked quite alot of response from the locals (and some tourists who were laughing) as we went past.

On our second evening in Melaka we went with some people from the hostel to a nearby hawkers centre for traditional Malaysian food, followed by drinks at a local bar.   Still pretty expensive for beers, but much better than Singapore and we even got a free pack of Carlsberg playing cards each from the live entertainment - a croaky-voiced man with a fondness for old Western hits.

Despite only spending a couple of nights in Melaka we were keen to press on and returned to the bus terminal (amid horrendous traffic due to the end of the Chinese New Year break) to catch another coach to Kuala Lumpur, or as everyone over here calls it, KL.  Again this was a very nice coach journey that only took a few hours, yet we somehow managed to leave in glorious sunshine and arrive in a torrential downpour.  We were thoroughly drenched within seconds of leaving the KL bus station to search for our hostel.  This wasn't helped by the fact that we only knew it was 'close' and were given dubious directions by a local, but managed to find 'The Grocers Inn' eventually with some help from an equally lost Nigerian and his map.  Like us, the room here was damp and tired-looking, and we ended up only staying here one night before moving down the street to the Backpacker Travellers Inn, which, even though it looked like a prison, was marginally better.

On our first full day in KL we actually headed out of the city on one of the local buses (which took a while, and some good fortune, to find) for about 2 hours to the Batu Caves.  These are a series of huge caves in the face of a mountain (one of the only ones you can see on the horizon), the highlight of which is the main cave which has a Hindu temple and various other shrines inside.  Our first sight of the caves was from a few kilometres away when we could see the huge golden Murugan (a Hindu deity) statue outside - the tallest in the world at nearly 43 metres.  This was really spectacular, especially as we arrived as dusk was setting in and the statue was lit up.  This statue guards a flight of 272 stairs leading to the main cave.  This itself is amazing, with huge stalectites and crevices, but the religious additions make it even more special.  Apparently over a million Hindus make a pilgrimage here every year for Thaipusam and the area is obviously set up for such an occasion with barriers and queuing lanes in place, but it was nearly empty on our visit.

Again we were on a flying visit of KL, but woke up early on our last day to take the inner-city train to the Petronas Towers.  Starting at half 8 in the morning they issue 1,400 free tickets every day to visit the skybridge, which is on the 42nd floor and links the two towers.  We arrived there at around 9:30, but already they were issuing tickets for 1:30pm or later.  This was too late for us as we had already booked a bus ticket, but after some sweet talking (and battering of the eyelids) we managed to get tickets for only 10 minutes later - absolute result!  Needless to say the view from the skybridge was pretty amazing, although we only had 10 minutes to appreciate it.  You can tell that this part of Kuala Lumpur is more modern, as the elaborately designed parks, fountains and clean-cut buildings make a stark contrast to some of the poorer areas of the city.

Yet again it was another coach trip (slightly less comfortable this time) from KL north through Malaysia to where we are now, Georgetown.  Penang refers to the small island off Malaysia's west coast, but Georgetown itself is also commonly called Penang.  The New Banana Guesthouse sits on one of the main roads in Georgetown, Jalan Chulia, and is basically a bar and travel agents with rooms out the back with a shared toilet or shall we say...squatters!  Holes in the ground to squat over...still with the shower in the same room.  Still quite comfortable and we decided to do a trial run with our mosquito nets, as we would soon be entering malaria areas.  Not quite as successful as we had hoped, but after a lot of duck tape and cursing they were up.  Met our first ladyboys here in a local foodcourt after asking them where the nearest bars and clubs were.  They were very helpful and told us, in lovely baritone and bass voices, of an area nearby, but we were put off when we were told the cover charge would be 50 ringgits.

Instead we got an early night (ish - James stayed up to watch some football) and took caught a local bus the next day away from Georgetown along the north coast of Penang.  Bear in mind that bus is a generous term - a bunch of planks of wood held together with rusty nails and with an engine strapped to the front would be a better description - but it managed to cough and splutter its way along the coast (at about 20kph) to Batu Feringgi, supposedly the nicest beach on Malaysia's west coast.  This is a dubious claim as there was a lot of rubbish and annoyingly pushy people trying to sell you parasailing, banana boat, or jetski rides.  The sun was shining though and it was good to relax for a bit soak up some rays.

That's all for now - next stop is Bangkok!