The coach company I'd booked with to get to KL had VIP coaches, but I didn't hold out much hope for anything more than a stinky old banger with no air con and a broken seat. Luckily (given my sleep deprivation) I was wrong, and it was one of the ones with 3 rather than 4 seats across, full air con and proper reclining seats. Not only that but it had TV screens in the back of the chair in front like on a plane - Bliss. I realised on the bus, I knew even less about Malaysia than Singapore, and my only plan was to travel "up" to Thailand, as quickly as I could. My plan soon went out the window!

The bus which I thought would take me to somewhere fairly central in KL, dropped us off under a huge concrete flyover - in the rain - in the middle of no where. It was a bit upsetting as I couldn't find a map or shop selling guidebooks or anyone who spoke any English! The flyover actually turned out to be a deserted looking sky train stop, so I bought a 1 ringgit ticket to KL Sentral - the next stop on the line. Luckily, arriving there it looked much more like a normal station with shops etc and I finally found a tourism office where they gave me a map and told me how to get a taxi to my hostel on the Jalan Bukit Bintang. Unfortunately the taxi driver hadn't a clue where on the road it was so we did three slow loops of one of the busiest streets in KL before finding it - luckily it was a pre-pay taxi! The hostel was really nice and cosy and the guy running it was helpful and happy to point me in the direciton of a book store. This was one travel guide I really needed, it was one thing winging it in Singapore - its basically one city! - but trying to plan a trip through a whole country like Malaysia needed more research! I ventured out on my own, having not met anyone yet, to a dodgy Hawker market in the basement of a shopping mall and sat eating my not very nice asam laksa surrounded by locals. When I returned to the hostel I made friends with an English girl called Charlotte, who had just come out for a 5 week trip following redundancy. This became a common theme for other Brits I met in Malaysia, I'm glad I've missed most of the direct effects of the recession... So I went out again with Charlotte to keep her company while she ate and the following day we joined up with two other girls - Ashlie and Maaike - to get a taxi to Sunway lagoon - a local amusement and water park. I'm not a massive fan of gut-wrenching rides but it was good way to meet people and we had a fun day - even if we were the only people in the water park not fully clothed.

The next day Charlotte and I went with an English guy called Colin on the sky train to China Town and caught a local bus to the Batu Caves. It was pretty straight forward thanks to a scrappy little map Ashlie had drawn us, so we got to the hot and sticky local bus pretty easily. The caves are situated at the top of a flight of 272 steps and house a Hindu temple and lots of monkeys (and chickens and cats also we discovered!) The caves themselves were pretty impressive, but the temple was not that exciting or grand in any way so we spent more time looking at the thronging monkeys! We then carefully descended the steep steps which looked a lot more threatening going down than up! When we finally found the bus back to town we met Ashlie there and spent ages traipsing the streets looking for somewhere to get food. We then treated ourselves to the "cute fish" treatment and stuck our feet into a big pool full of fish that nibbled all the dead skin off! Initially, it felt really ticklish but after that it became quite a nice feeling. A couple of aggressive fish managed to get hold of one of my wounds that hadn't properly healed after getting infected in PNG and nibbled so hard it started to bleed! All this needed was a plaster and the feet were back in the pool. When our time ran out Colin and Charlotte came with me to hunt for the tourist office to try and book some kind of trip to the Taman Negara national park. It was a bit confusing as on the map the little "i" was in the middle of a block and did not seem to be attached to a road! After we'd walked all four sides of the block and taken a few side roads in to it we finally found the office, but we may as well not have bothered! It was a pretty useless office and I ended up booking a bus ticket only - much to the annoyance of my hostel manager who then stopped talking to me for the rest of my stay! We also had a wander over to the Petronas Towers - the previously tallest building in the world, which were pretty cool. We weren't able to go up though "because it is Monday". Fair enough...

We went out for a few drinks in the evening - mainly as none of us had yet experienced KL night life! - but after a few drinks we were ready to head home and I had an early start in the morning to catch my bus up into the National Park.