Here we are at the end of day 2 - our first full day in Kuala Lumpur. We will certainly sleep well tonight. We managed to find our way to Chow Kit market this morning – with a combination of a monorail ride and a hike around the neighbourhood first we finally reached the market. For those of you who haven't been and plan to visit at a later date the best advice would be to retrace the monorail track when you leave the station and you will reach the market on your left side. Unfortunately we didn’t have that advice to hand so had an interesting trek first. Potholes and uneven pavements are the norm, as well as very high kerbs so you certainly keep mentally alert in between wiping the dripping sweat from the end of your nose. The market was quite an education. Many of the stalls only selling one or two different things eg mangoes and durian, or just bananas. Delving deep into the depths of the market through the narrow alleys between the stalls we eventually reached the wet market (the bit that sells the meat and fish). I have to admit the fish looked pretty good, and some of it was still flapping so it was definitely fresh. Both of us felt less inclined to buy anything to eat after seeing a humungous cockroach hotfooting across one of the food slabs. John wasn’t sure whether to kill it or throw a saddle on it. Admittedly there wasn’t any food on that one at the time but it still didn’t enthuse us to buy anything. Haven’t got desperate enough to fight the cockroaches for the food yet. Talking about fighting things off takes us to our afternoons encounter with ice lolly thieves.

As soon as i got the lolly in my hand i became prime target number one the – well number two if you count the bloke they successfully swiped a bottle of water from. I had to resort to a rather original dancing manoeuvre involving leaping around, waving my arms and making aggressive shooing noises to get them to back down. Balancing on a flight of stairs at the same time wasn’t easy. Having just climbed 272 steep steps in the 90% humidity i wasn’t going to give up my lifesaving medication that easy. I am pleased to say i did manage to shove it all in before any of them managed to prize it from my sticky mitts. I did feel rather victorious as i took the last bit off the stick. These Batu cave monkeys have no shame- trying to mug an old lady in broad daylight, and a foreign one at that.

One of our other highlights was John’s successful attempt to ask for the toilets in Malaysian. The way he was holding his ****** at the time might have something to do with his success as well. Have to take my hat off to him though he did give it a shot and he is making great progress trying to learn some Chinese script. Haven’t tested out whether he can write any of them yet – but watch this space. He will hopefully have mastered rice and noodles in Chinese by the end of the week J

We are becoming experts at the train system now – especially since we managed to get hold of a map of the routes. You get blue tokens now when you pay which you have to touch against the pad on the turnstile- a bit like what you do with an oyster card thing. We were a bit nonplussed on day one as to how to get through with this blue token thing but soon sorted it out and we are becoming pretty proficient now. It’s worth the 20p fare just to watch Tom & Jerry in the airconned carriage. Tom and Jerry the cartoon that is- not a couple of locals! If i didn’t have John in tow i could even go and sit in the women only carriages. To be honest i can’t decide whether its a good idea or not- i guess if it’s late at night its probably good but there never seems a problem in the day time- and out of all the places we’ve been this is the one country i can honestly say we haven’t been stared out as though we have just landed from mars.