Dear all,

We arrived in Malaysia after another gruelling journey from Thailand, first stop was China Town Penang, the first place that we were to eat off a banana leaf at the local Indian, normally you should eat the meal with your right hand but I think they might have taken pity on us westerners as we were given a knife and fork. Afterwards we decided to go for a couple of drinks and ended up in a karaoke bar, after much persuasion on Carlos's behalf we ended up singing a duet, and what's a Stoke girl to sing in a foreign country? You got it Delilah, Tom if you heard us heartfelt apologies. In Penang we visited a Mosque which in parts was decorated with the swastika sign, after a while we finally asked someone why, apparently it's not the swastika sign as it's the other way round. Next we took the train to the top of Penang Hill. The train took a total of 30 minutes and I hated every minute of it, in places it's nearly vertical, once at the top it's about 5 degrees cooler than the rest of Penang. The views were amazing you got to see all of Penang, we weren't there too long as once you'd seen the view and the monkey's there wasn't much left to do. We really enjoyed Penang but it wasn't what you could call a beach resort, as the beaches were very dirty.

On from Penang we went to the Cameron Highlands, our favourite place in Malaysia. Cameron reminded us of a cross between Switzerland with it's wooden style ski chalets and England as everywhere was selling Tea & Scones or if you preferred apple pie and ice cream, hey even the local Indian sold Jam Tarts!!! We went here nearly every day they were sensational. We were only going to stay in Cameron for 2 days but we ended up staying a week. Here we met a great guy called Alex who worked in the guesthouse where we stayed. He had converted outside into a bar, we were there for opening night and although the bar was small we loved it, needless to say we were his best customers, he looked the worse for wear when we left as we kept him up most nights. In Cameron we went Strawberry picking believe it or not, it was like we had our own personal bodyguard as this Malaysian man followed us round constantly, I don't think he grasped that we actually wanted to pick our own as he'd go off and come back with a big grin on his face with a handful of strawberries, in the end we ended up picking 2 boxes with the Malaysian man under strict instructions from us that he wasn't allowed to pick us 1 strawberry, so he and his friend watched us instead. In Cameron the way to get around is to hitchhike, so that's how we got home from the strawberry farm, although we had to make a small detour to pick up the lady's son from school. Cameron Highlands is famous for it's trekking, so off a trekking we went. We climbed the highest mountain in Cameron and started to play a game halfway through the climb, it was see how many flip-flops we could find left in the mud until we reached the top, you have to wonder what goes through peoples mind trekking in flip-flops!! The last 200meters was hard going typically it started to rain and it was more like the Krypton factor as it was so steep, Carlos didn't have too much of a problem but Emma short arse had great difficulty, again to get back to the guest house we hitch hiked but as we were so muddy we had to sit outside in the back of his van.
Next stop was a place called Malacca. Malacca is a colonial town and we spent quite a few evenings sitting outside in the street cafes. Next we went to Kuala Lumpur, which was our favourite capital city. Here we did the walking tour of the city ending up at the telecommunications tower, which we went up, the views from here were fantactic, they even had an art gallery that looked like the Sydney Opera House only the roof was green!! Kuala Lumpur is known for the Petronas Towers, we didn't go up these as the viewing bridge is only halfway up and we'd already been up the telecom tower. We decided to have a picnic one day in a park which the towers overlooked, we'd been walking for 5 minutes trying to find a good place to stop when we turned the corner and there was this swimming pool wih waterfalls for Children, it was great. The water was only shallow so we sat on the stepping stones with our feet in the water eating our lunch. We were there for a while when a group of school children arrived, they quickly stipped off and went into the water in their underpants, there was this one little boy who was about 4 with the biggest pair off pants you'd ever seen, he was only small and when he went in the water his pants retained loads of water, how they didn't fall down I don't know, all the other kids were laughing at him, bless!!! On the build-up to Carlos's birhtday we went to a rollercoaster park, which was in a place called the Genting Highlands. It was rather foggy as we walked into the park, so foggy infact that we were more or less on top of the rides before we could see them, they had a section dedicated to London which had a red london bus going to Picadilly. We absolutley loved KL but we left earlier as Phnom Phen was called AGAIN.

Lots of Love

Emma & Carlos xxxx