PENANG We made it to Georgetown, the main town on the island of Penang, at 6pm as planned after a pleasant journey sustained midway though by a sandwich and an incredibly sweet cup of coffee served as usual here with condensed milk, just in case it wasn't sweet enough in the first place. Two local buses later and we were in the resort town of Batu Ferringhi on the north of the island, where we had booked a room at Ali's Guest House. This was a great place, only ...

KUALA LUMPUR We got the metro back across town from Titiwangsa to Bangsar and met up with Modge. He and his wife Tammie have been living in Kuala Lumpur for the last few years and now have two little boys, Lucas and Finlay, and a large house in a nice part of the city. We spent the evening catching up then the next day sightseeing, KL is a real melting pot of different cultures with Chinese, Malays (Muslims) and Tamils (Hindus) living side by side in relative ha...

TAMAN NEGARALeaving Melaka, we took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, crossed the city by LRT metro, and hopped on another bus to Jerantut, a small town on the outskirts of Taman Negara National Park (ie National Park National Park) which is apparently the world's oldest rainforest. We stayed in our cheapest hostel so far in Jerantut (£3) and had dinner of steamed tilapia fish in the market managing to avoid the KFC which seems to be a ubiquitous sight on any Malaysia...

MELAKA, MALACCA AND MERDEKA We crossed into Malaysia from Singapore on a bus headed for the southern city of Melaka (which we never quite worked how to spell correctly so, for the purposes of this blog, we'll spell it the Malay way). En route we stopped off at a cavernous service station which reminded us of one we'd been to in Venezuela all those months ago, where we placed our order of Nasi Goreng and Singapore Fried Rice. The woman at the counter then barked ...

SINGAPORE Hooray! Back on track again with our travels, after the unexpected rainy interlude in Townsville. We weren't expecting too much from Singapore, as it generally gets mixed reviews, but we really enjoyed our first taste of Asia from the moment we saw the spectacular sight of hundreds of enormous oil tankers and container ships moored out to sea in the Malacca Straits as we came in to land. We spent a long weekend with our friends, Jackie and Jurgen, and ...