Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Greetings from Malaysia! This is a very multicultural place (with exciting food) with a British influence which can be seen in the architecture and the language... e.g. taxi is teksi, bus is bas, and restaurant is restoran! Most people on the east coast speak English quite well, so it's easy to ask for directions or arrange transport and so on. Some of them stare, but a lot of them (especially here in KL) are not bothered - which I prefer!
I had a relatively easy border crossing from Thailand in a minibus with an Australian family who were from Cairns and doing a long South-East Asian trip with a 6- and a 9-year old. Slightly unconventional... I got to sit next to the boy, who recited lots of Australian birds (with sound effects) and the South-East Asian currencies. It was a fun three hours... On the upside the dad was able to give me loads of tips on where to go on the east coast of Australia, as they travelled up and down it in a campervan.
I had arranged to meet my Finnish friend Pia (who also did art history at Warwick) in Penang in the afternoon. Unfortunately neither of us realised there's a one-hour time difference from Thailand, so she had to wait an hour! Great start... but actually finding each other once I arrived was relatively painless thanks to our mobile phones. She's in Penang for two months with her boyfriend (from Oz/South Africa) who works for Accenture and regularly works abroad. They're staying in a rather nice appartment complex (pool, gym, sauna..) and have a hire car, so Pia drives Garron to work and picks him up at the end of the day so she has the car to get about in during the day. We spent two days touring the island and taking in the sights, e.g. a waterfall, Penang Hill (by cablecar), a butterfly farm, the botanics (with monkeys), and Georgetown's museum, colonial district, Little India, Chinatown, and a great tour around a gorgeous mansion built by a Chinese businessman, Cheong Fatt Tze, and recently restored to its former glory. We had a great Chinese guide - she was really charismatic and funny, and went into details about Chinese culture, explaining chi, feng shui and yin/yang, and how they were applied to the house. We also went to the night market in Batu Feringgi (the area in which P & G live) and even though Garron thought it would be a brilliant idea if I bought a huge wooden parrot for about 500 pounds on M&D's credit card, I resisted.
I stayed two days with them, then got the ferry across to Butterworth (main transport hub in the area). Before Pia dropped me off we popped into a Tesco Lotus to see what it was like. The fresh veg and fruit section was nice because it was set out like in a market here, without being packaged, and everything looked fresh and tasty. Lots of meat, fish, noodles, rice (at prices that locals surely couldn't afford) but also international products like cereal and peanut butter.
From Butterworth I'd hoped to get to a place called Bukit Merah, where there's an orang-utan sanctuary, but my plans were soon dashed at the bus station, where I was told it was really only accessible by car. So I went straight to the Cameron Highlands (unfortunately with a drunk Malaysian next to me who kept flicking scrunched up pieces of paper with his phone number into my book - sooooo mature) and arrived as it was getting dark, so checked into the first place I saw. It was a cheapie hotel with a symbol pointing to Mekka on the ceiling, and I was woken at 6am by the prayer call, uuugh.. I moved to a place called the Cameronian Inn which had a really helpful American girl working there. She'd backpacked around Malaysia herself so was able to give me some tips for KL and Melaka. I also booked a tour with that guesthouse on the first day (with a nice group of Dutch ppl), which got me around BOH tea plantation (Best of Highlands tea - founded by a Scottish entrepreneur, and the fourth generation is running it now), a bee farm, a butterfly farm, the local market, a rose/flower farm and a strawberry farm (most of which were interesting, and no entry fee). The Cameron Highlands are very beautiful - rolling green hills, clear blue skies, and winding roads. The temperature is pretty constant at 23 degrees, so it's the only place in Malaysia they grow strawberries (they're pretty expensive).
In the evening I wandered around town looking for a place to eat and found a German-Swiss restaurant called "Schwaebing Haus" - thought it was funny so went in, and found the chef in the kitchen (he was also the waiter and everything else), who was of course Malaysian, kneading something that looked like it might turn into Spaetzle at some point if he was very lucky. He very enthusiastically sat me down opposite his only other guest - funnily enough one of the three German guys who had been on the minibus from Ko Pha Ngan and Surat Thani! Even funnier was that he turned out to be from Reutlingen near Stuttgart. So we had a nice chat over Zuericher Geschnetzeltes and Bratwurst (quite authentic actually). The next day I met up with him (Christoph) at his hostel, where we teamed up with three other guys to go on one of the hikes (there are specific trails you can take, which are clearly mapped). The others were from nr Cambridge, South Wales, and Newcastle, and had all met in the hostel. It was a good trek - partly through forest on a road, but also through the jungle, clambering over muddy tree roots (which was fun!!) all the way up to Gunung Brinchang, the highest point in the area (2031m), from where we should have had a spectacualr view but it was misty! Looked very atmospheric though and nice and cool for walking. Then down the hill on the other side through the tea plantations, which was really scenic, and stopped for cake and tea there (they all had a couple of cakes each!). They were all too proud to ask for breaks in the jungle, but seemed extraordinarily relieved when we took one! I went, "Gosh, this is hard work!" and Matt went, "Oh, well, do you want to stop for a minute?" and then everyone quickly agreed that would be a fantastic idea. We must have walked at least 25km, and we felt we really deserved dinner that night, which we had in an Indian place (yummy roti, which is like Naan just flakier) with a Californian and a Polish guy as well. I don't think I'll ever be able to say again that I went out for dinner with six guys! They certainly brought me up to scratch on politics, football, American TV series, and the commonly consumed alocoholic concoctions in Poland! After that we sat around a bonfire that they have at one of the hostels every night. Most backpackers end up there as most hostels want silence after 10.30pm and there's only one (overpriced) bar in town, so there was a good crowd.
Next day I got a bus to Kuala Lumpur, which the American girl at the hostel had warned me would take me along a very windy road (she had counted 400 bends). Someone had thrown up on the seat next to mine, so I thought I was probably in for a bad journey, but the road was actually not too bad (Laos was worse) and the smell was bearable too. You can get used to anything!
Once in KL I found myself a hostel (which is really noisy but also busy which is good) and today is my first proper day sightseeing - I'm now in Chinatown to check out the markets and Merdaka square (the colonical district) and later KL tower, which has better views than the Petronas towers (which I'll see tomorrow). My friend Rachel has put me in touch with her friend Azmir, who lives here (and I met briefly at Warwick), so we're going to meet for lunch or dinner. I'll be off to Melaka on Wednesday or Thursday, and in Singapore at the end of the week, and blog again before I get to Australia (where internet prices will leap up, I'm sure!).