We spent our first night in the bustling cosmopolitan metropolis of Kuala Lumpur in a hostel that was down a side road, round the back of a shop and that charged for toilet paper. We'd probably have been better off sleeping rough. Anyway, the next morning we left in a hurry with our lives on our backs and tried to find the hotel which was to be our home for the next three nights. Through clever employment of my superior map-reading skills I worked out that it wou...

The bus to the Perhentian Islands was horrible, let's just leave it at that. The speedboat over to the islands from the mainland was much more fun, as the driver was going way too fast and the boat was bouncing all over the place. We transferred onto another, smaller boat in the middle of one of the bays and that took us to our "resort", which had a bay to itself. There wasn't much to the place at first glance, just a few beach huts around a bigger hut...

The bus journey to Taman Negara once again set a new standard of driving hell. I don't even need to go into detail any more, it was just like all the other journeys but longer. The best part was that when we finally arrived at our hotel there were no staff to be seen, and when we found someone she had the audacity to say "wait 5 minutes". Jacqui ate her throat. The place itself was alright, but full of cockroaches, geckos and other creatures, but that w...

Our journey to the Cameron Highlands was so organised it shamed the high speed and efficiency travel we had become accustomed to in Japan. The road network there is so developed that we definitely didn't have to fly to Kuala Lumpur first, nor did we have to get a bus from the airport to the city centre which left when the driver could be bothered to switch on the engine. After this we certainly weren't left hanging around with our bags in the tropical hell-rain, ...

So back to islands and beaches, which meant more boats....I have discovered that I am actually a lot more sea sick than I thought I was so I wasn't looking forward to the 2 and a half hour journey being packed onto a tiny boat. The boat ride turned out to be just as bad as I thought and even longer so we couldn't wait to get onto dry land and get to our hotel. When we eventually got there it turned out to be one of the nicer hotels on the island and our room was ...