Southern Malaysia

After our wonderful Jungle Adventure, Carla and I decided to hold up in a more developed part of the country for a while and spend a week in Kuala Lumpur. The city was quite drab, even being the capitol, and had not much to offer in night life, or culture for that matter. But we ended up at a fantastic guesthouse, Wheelers, where we met loads of cool travellers and staff. We spent our evenings on the roof top bar or hallway bench drinking bottles of whiskeywith our Canadian friends Shane and Cody and dancing to Kelly Clarkson...that was when the footy wasn't on. And our days roaming the streets and the Chinatown market for great deals on "brand name" items. What the city lacked in ambiance it definitely made up in bargain shopping. It was so hard to resist. I have never seen better fakes in my life...or tour of Asia I guess.

We did venture out one day with the lovely Irish duo of Owen and Wally to see the "park". We were planning on seeing deer and birds and buterflies at this so-called oasis in the middle of the city. Well it turned out the park was being built, or renovated in many places and all the "animal parks" were closed, although not due to renovation, due to death actually. Turns out all the deer died. Oh well they were imported from Holland anyways, and so not much of a Malay flavor there. And the buterfly park was like 5$ to get in, and so we toured the gift shop and figured we got the same thing except the butterflies weren't exactly moving, persay. Anyhow, a good day anyways, and of course finished off with yet another bottle of quality whiskey. Malaysia is a very Muslim country and so alcohol is kind of hard to come by, for our standars and really expensive in the bars to boot. About 8 Rm(2.50$) a glass of beer, and that's happy-hour. Crazy!

So after putting off packing up our stuff again for a couple days and becoming the un-official KL/ Malaysia tourguides for all the new Wheelers guests we left for Palau Tioman, to join a few of our friends, Paul(England) and Jenny and Johnny(Scotland) on the duty-free island. We also grabbed a fellow Canadian, Marie-Helen(Quebec), to pass the days in our hammoks enjoying the sun. The evenings we spent at the little bar on the beach with all the local boys....too many actually. Seemed to me there was a shortage of young women on the island. Leading to many locals I nick-named Chester for reasons you could all probably guess. After running away a few times, they kinda got the hint and stayed away...kinda. All in all great time. The local drunken chef made us Poutine for Canada Day and the boys built us a bonfire. We recruited another Quebecois and sang the National Anthem on the beach, after spending the day snorkelling and drinking beer of course. We represented and then took off for Singapore a couple days later....the end.

-R