Malaysia...hmm. We only spent 5 days here in total so couldn't really say we'd seen it all, but our overall impression was that it was quite a nice country. Polite and mostly fairly modern, cooler than Singapore but with the same mix of Malay, Chinese and Indian, there were a lot of similarities.

We arrived in Kuala Lumpur fairly late in the day and although it was cooler than where we'd come from, our rather grotty hostel was boiling so it was a rather sleepless night...One marked difference from Singapore was the Muslim influence- lots of mosques, Arabic looking buildings, Arabic signs, and people wearing head coverings. We had a stroll to the main City square and laughed at the Tudor style houses sitting on a cricket green - could have been a country village in England!

We also fought our way through some very busy market places, resisting the temptation to invest in some fake 'designer' goods as we went! We had a lovely meal that night though, 'clay pot rice' where everything is cooked up in a big clay pot over charcoal, rice, meat, veg and then pulled out at the last minute all tender and baked - mmm! Sitting on the street at a little plastic table among Chinese women having a slanging match, surrounded by locals and stalls and traffic, we felt like we fitted in quite well!

After a trip up the Petronas towers - formerly the world's highest before Taiwan 101 came along - and a quick stroll round the city, we realised we had rather filled our city appetite in Singapore...so in the handy way that backpackers can, we packed up our lives and took a bus away to the hills in search of some cooler weather!

The Cameron Highlands became a haven for our colonial predecessors for precisely the same reason we suspect. Green and luscious but high enough to be cool and even rainy, it seemed to be THE place to grow stuff! Because of the cooler weather all sorts of familiar things were growing - strawberries, cabbages, broccoli, courgettes, and our most favourite - tea! We never thought we would be grateful for a day or too of misty rain and UK like temperatures, but we actually were! Only a day or two though!

The old Brits had left their mark and made the place a mini Britain with a lot of buildings that looked kind of Tudor, the tea obsession of course, and the one that Cal liked best: the tradition of the local people to have tea with scones, jam and cream around mid afternoon! Get in! 

We went on a trip to see a tea plantation and lots of other things were thrown in like rose gardens, butterfly farms, honey bee farms, strawberry farms and any other kind of farm you can imagine! The tea plantation was beautiful - hill after hill of green bushes, it was so peaceful and serene, and the best bit was the smell that lingered in the air -you guessed it, tea! We went inside the factory and saw how it was all processed. By the end of the day we felt we knew an old friend even better.

We went on a mission one day to find a jungle path and see if we could stay on it till the end. It wasn't as hard as we thought being more like Mac forest than a junlge thanks to the altitude, but it was a good insight into how the real people live as we tramped past their houses and fields. People cut bunches of herbs with scythes and dug trenches with sticks. Looked like hard work.

In the evening we finally managed to find some Malay food - so far we'd only got to Chinese and Indian. Again we felt like locals as we sat surrounded by Malay people and ate some really lovely food for about a quid and a bit for both of us!

We did feel like we were cheating a bit hanging out in the Highlands though - kind of an easy existence for a Brit! - so in the name of adventure we packed up again and headed for Penang.

Penang is an island not that far from the Thai/Malaysia border. It has lots of colonial history too and was an important port (we think...we didn't pay up to get into any of the museums!). It's quite pretty too and only a little hop from the mainland. We stayed in a nice little hostel place run by a switched on Malaysian lady, with a room that looked out over the restaurant and a bathroom that was a room with a bucket! We had a rather brief but enjoyable stay there as we felt that time was marching on, and we needed to get to Thailand!