Greetings from Malaysia!

Yes, we are in yet another new country! We know it's not been long since the last message but we're going to be offline for at least a week so thought we'd squeeze another update in now rather than doing a massive one later.

We flew from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur last Sunday and had a bit of a culture shock as it's the most modern country that we've been in for a long time. It's just like being in a European city but even more glitzy and advanced. We've never seen so many shopping centres in one place. We only visited about 6 and that was a fraction of how many there are and they're all packed! We also had several trips on the monorail, which was quite spacey!

We caught up with our Western food and managed at least one fast food restaurant a day. To be honest, it was some of the cheapest food to eat and it's everywhere!

Malaysia feels a lot easier to travel in than anywhere else in SE Asia. Everyone speaks English, for most of them it's their normal daily language, and all signs and posters are in English. It makes things almost too easy and perhaps a little bit boring. South America was hard work in the places where no-one spoke English and we were forced to speak Spanish, but it definitely felt like we were properly travelling.

We visited the Petronas Towers which is the second tallest building in the world and the thing that most people associate with KL. We didn't manage to get tickets to walk across the bridge, but to honest, Clare was very relieved as she's very scared of heights. But she did manage to make it up the Menarka communications tower to the observation floor which was 276m up.

But the thing that we'll always remember KL for is how unbelievably humid it is. It was about 70-80% humidity and in the mid-30s. Everywhere is heavily air-conditioned which is a relief but within minutes of stepping outside we were drenched in sweat again! We cooled down with slurpies from the 7-11.

The left the heat of KL behind and travelled 3hrs North to the Cameron Highlands. The climate is much cooler here as it's only in the early 20s (ha ha, sorry!), we've even felt a little cold at night! We've visited a tea plantation, butterfly farm, honey bee farm, rose gardens and a strawberry farm. We also went for a trek in the forest nearby. We'd asked advice for a medium level walk and ended up doing near vertical ascents that were more like rock climbing.

We've enjoyed our time here as it's so chilled out and relaxed. It could almost be in Germany or Switzerland because there's loads of black and white wooden chalet-style houses.

We move on tomorrow morning to the Perhentian Islands on the East coast where we're going to top up our faded tans!!

Here are our KL and Cameron Highlands pictures:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=410502&id=746595533&l=f854310c52

We hope you're well and can't believe that we'll be back in 3 weeks! How time has flown.

Much love,
Clare & Nicky
xxxx