Showered (needed, after 3 days in the bush), with two loads of laundry done (needed, after 3 weeks of east coast travelling), it was time to say goodbye to the best Sydney host I could have hoped for (bacon, beer, laundry and lovely laid-back company make for one happy couch-crashing backpacker) and escape the rain that descended upon NSW on Australia Day. Next stop; Asia!

My AirAsia flight to Kuala Lumpur was barely a quarter full so if it wasn’t for the fact that I needed to get some kind of loose plan for my time in Malaysia together, I could have slept like a king across the row of seats I had all to myself.

My hostel in Chinatown was just a 10min walk from the bus stop so was easy to find and required no negotiating with random taxi drivers. After checking in, I went through the market on Petaling Street, excited to be back in colourful Asia with its mix of cultures, religions, street food and colours.

I spent a day covering the mosques, temples and the Islamic art museum (absolutely beautiful museum! The textiles section was my favourite, I found it much easier to understand the cultural variations across the muslim world in that section than I did in the others where I just felt hopelessly uneducated on Islamic architecture, ceramics, writings, weaponry and general history) before heading up to Little India for a giant curb-side curry. The next day I walked to the Petronas Towers for the obligatory KL photos, followed by an afternoon of drinking iced coffee in the golden triangle before finding a place that did awesome vegetarian noodles fried in chilli and blackbean sauce where I chatted to the owner about badminton and Morten Frost. Denmark actually opens conversational doors out here!

I think I went a little overboard on the ‘no concrete planning’ approach I arrived in Malaysia with because suddenly I found myself having a bunch of post-it notes in my guidebook but no logical route or sense of cost or time requirements. I also had three countries that I kept switching between wanting to visit and going back and forth about adding to the itinerary or not so booking flights was becoming a bit tricky. Decisions needed to be made.

So I extended my travel insurance another month (no, actually that’s a lie because Barclays travel insurance doesn’t let you do that from abroad. I had to buy a new one from another company) because that seemed the only way to give myself enough time to faff about in Malaysia and Thailand and add Nepal to the plans. Burma and Cambodia put up strong cases but it was Nepal that won out on this occasion in the end. So with that decision made, and flights to India and the Andamans booked, it was time to focus on tackling Malaysia.

I decided to head south from KL, via Melaka on the way to Singapore. And it quickly became clear that I’m having some public transport readjustment issues. TBS, the KL bus station, got pronounced in Spanish when asking for directions to the bus stop and when the correct bus pulled up and someone pointed at it and asked me if I was going to ‘TBS?’, I replied ‘si!’. Old habits die hard I guess. Once at the bus station, it also became clear I need to re-learn how to deal with over-friendly locals because I was probably too polite to the man who was a little too eager to help me buy my ticket because despite sorting out my ticket on my own, he insisted on sitting next to me on the bus and wouldn’t stop chatting. By the end of the trip, I had moved seats to escape the constant questions and he had moved on to declaring his undying love for me so I had to run into the terminal to lose him in the arrival crowds when we reached Melaka.

I just spent the day in Melaka, seeing the architectural remains of the Dutch occupation, walking through Chinatown, visiting Malaysia’s oldest traditional Chinese temple, drinking my first Tiger in Asia (the Carlsberg novelty has worn off) and eating popiah (mammoth fresh spring roll) and nyonya laksa (pho meets thai red curry) along Jonker Street where I properly remembered why I love Asia – people are so friendly (and generally not creepy, the bus guy is an anomaly), I chatted to a Singaporean who spent 6 months in Sweden and spoke Swedish practically fluently and a girl from Taiwan who’s been travelling through Thailand for the last 3 weeks, just because we happened to be sitting at the same 8-person table, waiting for our streetfood.

By 10pm I was back at the bus station for my arrive-in-the-middle-of-the-night bus across the border to Singapore (ah what I don’t do to save money on accommodation). I only spent 2 days there but it deserved its own blog post which is already up here.

Next, it was off to Cameron Highlands which had come with recommendations from an awesome Canadian on my Fraser Island tour in Australia and a few (equally awesome) people at my KL hostel. I had seen their photos and I wanted my own!

It was a 9 hr trip from Singapore to Tanah Rata, on what I learned from the one only other passenger on the bus, was a non-stop service. So my backpack didn’t need to go in the hold, instead it got two whole seats to itself but in turn had to suffer the ridiculously cold aircon along with me. The first hostel I went to on arrival was fully booked so I went to one I’d passed on the way which didn’t have dorms but did have ridiculously cheap box rooms in the attic which contained a mattress and a fluorescent light. Checked in, I ran into a guy in the hallway who told me a group of guys were setting off on one of the jungle treks that morning so I invited myself along and joined them on the trek up Trail 1, up to a peak at about 2’000m and I did my best to follow the pace up the hill. Which I didn’t manage to do at all. I need to take up sports. We continued on another trail through the mossy forest, where I put on a great display of lack of balance and sunk a foot right into the mud (new trainers no longer looking so new), but when we ran into a group of people who told us it was a 4 hour round-trip just to get back to where we were at that point, we decided to turn back as we knew we had to backtrack the whole route we had done that far. So after 5 hours of pretty solid jungle trekking effort, we were back on the bus back to Tanah Rata.

One of the guys was planning to rent a scooter the next day to drive out to see some of the tea plantations and asked if I wanted to join which sounded like a great way to see the area to me. So the next morning we rented a scooter (of local standards, not Swiss unfortunately) and set off out of town. We stopped at Boh tea plantation which had some incredible views before continuing on to Ringlet, the neighbouring town which had a Hindu temple. When i was in KL, I had read that there was a Hindu festival on at the Batu Caves outside the city; the one where there are people who actually voluntarily hurt themselves by attaching hooks to their back, but I knew my timing was off to catch that so hadn’t given it much thought since. But then we heard that it was also being celebrated in Ringlet and that seemed like something worth checking out. And it definitely was.

The temple was full of people, women dressed up in colourful sarees, drums playing, peacock feathers being waved about. And then there was the procession through the town, down the road to the temple, with someone carrying (and dancing about with) a pretty big 3-level pyramid, followed by a guy with hooks attached to his back dragging another guy, and a group of about 4 others with swords stuck through their arms and necks following behind him. It was absolutely mental and slightly unpleasant to look at but the kind if thing it’s also really hard to look away from. We followed them along the road for a good 20-30min before they got back to the temple where several (local) people started telling us that there was food at the back of the temple and we should go get some. So we got to have an awesome free lunch and got to experience the community spirit that radiated from everyone all day (it didn’t matter where you were from, what your religion is, what you wear, how many photos you want to take, everyone was just celebrating Thaipusam (I didn’t learn the name till later but let’s just pretend I’m intelligent enough to actually know that kind of stuff). After finishing our unexpected awesome free lunch, we headed back towards Tanah Rata to return the bike which (miraculously!) held together the whole way. We finished the day with another cheap street food meal and a few Tigers. It was such an unexpectedly awesome day, it’ll for sure feature among the more memorable days of this trip.

  The next morning it was time to bid the temperate climate of the Cameron highlands goodbye and head to Penang. Which I had been told had even better food than what Malaysia had thrown at me that far. And it did. I stayed in Georgetown and spent 3 lovely days wandering about, taking in the mix of modern cafes alongside hawker centres and old skool Chinese coffee bars. I caught up with my Hackney flat mate again who made sure I didn’t leave the place without sampling the typical dishes Malaysia has to offer. We went to seafood restaurant one might (D’Seafood Paradise – name says it all) which was a beyond-awesome meal and visited the snake temple which made me realise I’m actually really shallow because I only really liked looking at the snakes in pretty colours.

My last stop in Malaysia was Langkawi, a 2 1/2 hr boat ride from Penang. But for future reference, don’t forget to factor in 2 extra hours of ridiculously slow boarding procedures (one person across the boarding plank at a time! I seriously started to question if we’d actually make it out the harbour on the date stated on our tickets). But Langkawi is worth however long a wait they throw at you. It has all the great food (roti canai overload but they rivalled Penang’s) plus green hills and white sandy beaches (and a black sandy one, you know, just to keep you on your toes). I rented a scooter and zoomed around some of the island sights which was an awesome day.

So Malaysia proved itself to be a multifaceted melting pot of cultures, religions, landscapes, colours and food. Malay, Chinese, Indian; Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism; cities, tea plantations, hills, beaches, beautiful coastlines; curry, roti, laksa, dumplings. So in short: best reintroduction to Southeast Asia. It might have been 3 years since my last visit but it’s good to be back!
Today I’m listening to: Royal Blood – ‘Careless’