Just for a change, I thought I'd throw a current blog entry into the mix! Despite spending about a week everywhere we go now, instead of only a couple of days, I'm still in a position where I've got half a dozen entries written and still to type up, and two or three still to write altogether. Clearly, I'm never going to be fully up to date, so I reckon random current blog entries may be the way forward.

We've had a very mixed two and a half days in Kuala Lumpur thus far. For various reasons. On our first half day (our bus having got in just after lunch), we checked into our pre-booked guesthouse to discover it was a hole. I can't remember why we booked ahead, actually, as we haven't done that for ages, but we did. And I'm sure won't do again. It was a massive, ramshackle, old colonial house, with about thirty partitioned rooms crammed in over three floors. I don't actually think it was dirty, but it just had an aura of filth, with it's large, open spaces all filled with tat (including a number of massive, painted canvases, which I do have to admit was pretty interesting), scattered mugs still containing coffee dregs, ashtrays still full of the contents of the previous night's backpacker bonding, and furniture all mismatched and broken. I imagine there are long-haired, guitar playing, spliff smoking hippies, who rave about the place, and it certainly had character, but a bit too cool for school to be our cup of tea. I didn't mind the social spaces too much, although they were a bit congested (in part with guests who were awake and reading or chatting, in part with sprawled, passed out bodies), but our room was a hot, windowless box. It's depressing not having daylight, and waking up in the pitch black, not knowing if it's 4am, as it seems, or actually six hours later. Almost amusingly, in fact, I saw a flyer for the guesthouse, which advertised all rooms as having windows. I could swear not a single one did, unless a window into a dark corridor counts! And Paula hated the entire place. But we'd reserved and paid for two nights, so we were stuck there for a short while. But not to worry, we didn't have to stay there after that, and I'd been excited about the Liverpool v Newcastle game for a few days, particularly following Tottenham's defeat the previous day, which meant we could overtake them and move into fifth position in the table. I did some research, found a couple of decent sounding sports bars, and we set off to find them at 5pm. Kick-off 7pm. An hour later, we'd covered where I thought they were, but found nothing. Not a catastrophe, still an hour to go, and wandering around is good for familiarising yourself with a city anyway. I popped into an internet café to double check the addresses. Turned out one bar was further down a road we'd walked part-way along, and the other had relocated, and was in fact now next door to the first one. But it had started raining. Alas not normal rain, not even England's version of heavy rain, but Malaysia's version of heavy rain. Rain so hard streets immediately take on the appearance of fast flowing rivers, and just walking in it for five yards gets you soaked to the bone. We got wet standing under the shelter of a shop front, just from the spray of raindrops landing hard on concrete, and gusts of wind throwing handfuls of it towards us. Incidentally, Lonely Planet says that Kuala Lumpur's months of highest rainfall are March and September, and that April has one of the lowest. However, the guy in the Chinese café we spoke to today, whilst sheltering from the rain again, said it was May and September. Based on our time spent here so far, the Chinese man is right, and Lonely Planet is wrong. But back to match night. The game was on in a bar about three hundred yards down the road in a little over half an hour, but the rain was so heavy we couldn't get to it! It lessened briefly, and we made it across the road, sheltering again under adjoining shop-front canopies, and making a further fifty yards undercover. A dash which alone got us fairly wet. But the ultra heavy stuff lashed down once more, and we were stuck again. Nothing to do but stand, watch and wait, along with the masses. It was relentless, and by quarter to seven, still two hundred yards short, I was ready to just take an outdoor shower to make kick off. It lessened again slightly, and I made a run for it, with the intention of confirming the bar was definitely there, before coming back to grab Paula. It was, but by the time I'd got there, it was pelting down again. I waited five minutes, the downpour continued, and I was left with no choice but to take it on the chin, or rather the top of the head, and go and get her regardless. I was drenched. Jumping into a pond would barely have made me less so. And a minute or so before kick off, through sheer generosity, Paula decided to brave it too, and we splashed our way to the bar. On the plus side, over the next couple of hours, we dried slightly, and Liverpool won three nil. On the not so bright side, we were still mainly wet, there was no commentary, and beers were three quid a glass. A small glass. We trudged back in light rain to our dark, pit of a room, less than enamoured with our first impressions.

Day two. A Monday, and I hadn't mentioned it, but many of the streets had been eerily quiet the day before. We'd just put that down to it being a Sunday, though. It was now mid morning, however, and there were still more shutters down than up, and the streets of the city were hardly alive with people to-ing and fro-ing. Not to worry, a minor observation. Our primary chore and immediate focus in Kuala Lumpur was to get our visas for India. A wise choice, we thought, what with it being a capital city in a relatively developed country, not a million miles from India, and with a ten percent population of Indian descent. And in stark contrast to my unnecessary traipsing back and forth across Bangkok for a day, roughly a month earlier, the office we needed this time, the couldn't be more clearly titled "India Visa Centre", was literally a two minute walk around the corner. Result! I popped in on passing to check if they provided forms, or if we'd have to download them. No queues, definitely open, looking better by the minute. But then the moment of disaster. The lady behind the desk told me that if I wasn't a resident, or in Malaysia on an employment visa, my chances of a successful application were incredibly slim. And if I decided to apply anyway, I'd have to wait five days to have it confirmed that the application had failed, and wouldn't get a refund. I believe you'll have better luck in Bangkok. Have a nice day, sir. What the…?! We checked online, it was true, the rules had changed only six months ago, India no longer issued visas to tourists in Malaysia, as policy. Bangkok did, however only three month visas, not the six months we were expecting, and needed, to allow Paula to do a couple of month long courses she had her eye on, as well as a bit more WWOOFing, with some sightseeing on top. b*****.

But you know what, strangely, neither of us was particularly downcast by this news. At least not to the degree I would have expected. We may have to journey back up to Bangkok, and sorry about the cliché, but the more you travel, the smaller the world seems. Having done it for many months now, our escapades these days, zigzagging around the Asian continent, feel like nothing more than a bar crawl around Manchester on a macro scale, with day long bus journeys no more hassle than walking twenty minutes between venues on a Saturday night. And if it turns out somewhere isn't any good, or we've left a coat behind, it's an inconvenience, but no massive hardship to double-back and sort things out. Time isn't really an issue, and the hours sat reading, listening or sleeping disappear very quickly. So we may both have to alter plans, but we've been doing that repeatedly for the last couple of months anyway, and it's actually a nice feeling being able to. A feeling of travelling freely, without being tied to a pre-defined schedule of a week here, three days there, five days there, etc.

But I've wandered off musing ever so slightly. It still wasn't ideal, and it added to a crap guesthouse in a city far from living up to expectations. Plus, we couldn't really just up and leave without having decided on our next move, so had to at least put our thinking caps on for a while.

But day three, today, and it's as if the clouds have opened and the sun is suddenly shining through. Literally, not the case, as it's been raining again, but the mood has lifted, the urge to escape has dissipated, and we're now keen to stay and check out what suddenly seems a lively, exciting city. We moved guesthouses, which I think set the ball rolling. We looked around, not definitely planning to move, and found somewhere a bit more expensive, but with light, air, cleanliness, a very nice, helpful Indian man behind reception, and in a part of town only a couple of minutes walk away from our first guesthouse. In a direction which we hadn't yet explored, but which is alive and buzzing. Then we had the idea of sending our passports back to England, getting an agency to apply for India visas for us, and then getting them sent back. It may or may not work, but it's a plan. And we've had nice food, it's rained but the rain hasn't caught us out, people have been friendly and I have a brilliant new map of Kuala Lumpur, with loads of interesting places I'm looking forward to checking out tomorrow.

So that brings me up to date! But as ever, to finish off, I have a few observations. Firstly, to my surprise, some of the subway carriages are for ladies only. If only this was an observation I'd made before trying to get on one! I perhaps should have done, given that the carriage in question was packed with ladies only, and there were big signs on the outside saying "ladies only". In bold, pink font, with large, public toilet-esque, symbols of ladies. Fortunately, a uniformed gentleman was stationed accordingly to provide further clarification to idiots like me, and did so without any apparent irritation. Thankfully. I think I might have felt a tad awkward if I'd received the news once on the train, having set off from the station, under the gaze of a crowd of ladies.

Secondly, for some reason, all cafes and restaurants have a sign up saying "no outside food allowed". Why is this? Isn't it obvious? Or do Malaysians have a penchant for taking their own food into restaurants? We speculated that somewhere in the city there's a small café that's unaware of the need to put up the sign, which is plagued daily by hordes of Malaysians armed with massive hampers and crates of ale, all turning up and feasting on extravagant Famous Five style picnics.

And finally, an observation not of Malaysia, but back in the direction of home. I went on the internet the other day to get some news on the upcoming AV referendum, surely the principal news topic of the moment. And there was nothing. Whereas there was complete domination of the news space by some poxy Royal wedding! Is everyone really that bothered? Yes, to my amazement, it would seem so. It was even on TVs here, being watched by Brits abroad and Malaysians alike. Facebook commentary was dominated by it, I later noticed. Not just parents and grandparents, but my own peers were sucked in. And then I found out it was one of the highest viewed television events of all time, in the UK! Up there close to the 1966 World Cup final! I remain bemused. And then they killed Bin Laden yesterday. Needless to say, complete domination of the BBC News website page space. Maybe they'll just put the referendum off for a week or two. Wait 'til the football season's finished too, in case it looks like no-one's going to remember to head down to the polling station. I don't know.

Anyway, more news of Kuala Lumpur before we actually leave Kuala Lumpur, I'm sure…