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Sorry it has been sooo long since we have done any updating on our adventures! I promise we are going to make an effort to fill in the gaps as soon as possible!
We are now in Malaysia... a bit of a spur-of-the-moment idea which came about in Picton a couple of days before we left New Zealand - slightly tipsy, after having almost won a pub quiz (we didn't lose anyway, which was a first for me) - and we decided to trim Australia down to one week only and pull forward our flights to Thailand.
We spent two hot nights doing nothing in an Airport hotel, staying out of Bangkok for the piece of mind of our mothers (and our own safety of course). There was nothing to do at all, until a massive market appeared just before our shuttle to the airport and I had time enough to have the best fish of my entire life for about 60p. Result.
We arrived late in Kuala Lumpur and spent the next morning in the boiling heat finding a new place to stay because the nice hostel was booked up. The result was perhaps our second most horrendous place to stay, along a similar vein to the hole-in-the-celing episode in Playa del Carmen, but at least this time we had a window, even if it was blacked out.
We quickly realised that Kuala Lumpur is HUGE, and spent an entire day travelling around doing nothing. I got a bit excited about the monorail that flies over the city until I realised it gives you the sensation you are definitely going to die, and have now decided I'd rather not go on a monorail again. Lauren sorted her return flight to Thailand (we are now staying in Malaysia until the 7th of June and are hoping in this time to visit Singapore as well as, hopefully, Borneo), and we sampled some local food (all the Malaysians do is eat, seriously). Kuala Lumpur is a massive mix of Indian, Chinese and Malay cultures so there is a huge diversity of people, and toilets. Most toilets seem to be the old Chinese style hole-in-the-ground with foot pads to stand on and a hose pipe in the wall, so every new place is a bit of a gamble.
The second day we got up at dawn to be more productive and caught the train to the Petronus Twin towers. We had to queue for about an hour because the tickets to the sky-bridge between the towers come on a first-come-first-served basis, and the lobby was packed full of holidaying Chinese people, who spent the hour waiting quite happily taking photos of each other / the crowd / the lobby / the escalator, and never becoming any less excited about it.
Having booked a visit for 6.30 that evening, we went to the food hall and I had the wierdest breakfast of my life, which was a pick-and-mix of every fruit I could find that I hadn't heard of, which I topped with some kind of nutty grit, and which was a massive let-down in general as it all turned out to taste like exotic public toilet. The boys were more sensible and stuck to the bakery and Burger King; I dont't think they were disappointed.
We then caught a bus about 15km from KL city to the Batu Caves, which we had heard were a worthwhile place to visit. After waiting for the bus in the 5000 degree heat for about 2 hours, the bus itself took another hour as the roads were at a standstill as we had co-incided with the end of worship in all the mosques. It was worth it though - not only did we have an incredible Indian meal for about 80p when we got there, we also saw the biggest statue in the world (Malaysians are onsessed with records) a HUGE gold Buddha guarding the entrance to the caves (the caves are also a place where the Hindus go on pilgrimage). We climbed a lot of steps covered in a LOT of monkeys and then entered the caves, which are absolutely enormous, and they would have been mindblowing if it wasn't for the myriad of cluttered souvenir stalls and the general stink of public toilet. The temples inside have a sort of fake look about them, as if someone made them out of plastic and just popped them in the cave for effect, but it kind of added to the wierd appeal of the place. After exploring and watching the monkeys for a bit we headed back out into the blazing heat to catch a bus back to the city.
That afternoon we had a wierd hour in Topshop and Marks and Spencers before Lauren and I tried some wierd icecreams including coconut with sweetcorn and black sesame seed while we waited for the boys to finish calculating how much more expensive Topman was in Ringgit than in Pounds.
The Petronus tower visit was generally hilarious - we had to sit through a DVD on Patronus which informed us that everyone that works there is a 'hero' and that the tower inspires Asians all over the world. Feeling very inspired ourselves, we were whisked up 41 floors in the fastest elevator known to man before being granted our ten minute panorama out over Kuala Lumpur's skyscrapers, a pretty awesome view.
We got back that night to a free BBQ on the roof of our hostel which bumped it up slightly in our estimations, before having a quiet beer and catching some sleep before our bus-ride up north in the morning.
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