The main reason we went to Penang, an island off the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, was because it was described in the guidebook as the food capital of Malaysia (I'm starting to notice food cropping up quite frequently in these posts..!). And the food was amazing - lots of cheap market goodies, big mixture of Indian and Chinese food along with the fried rice we'd got so used to. Some of the restaurants were a bit pushy though, especially one Indian plac...

Continuing our overland journey through Malaysian Borneo, we went to Kota Kinabalu, the main city in Sabah, and stayed outside the city in a beachside hostel for Sivi's birthday. Accompanied by our dorm-mate Katrina, we went to one of the islands off the coast of Borneo for some excellent snorkelling and a delicious beach buffet. Many beaches later, that beach is still far and away the best one we've been to on this whole trip! The hostel owners then took us to...

Brunei made a good overland stopover between the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah in Borneo, so we decided to see what it had to offer - it's by far the shortest chapter in the guidebook, so it seemed pretty manageable in a day. The border crossing was ridiculously easy and efficient, especially now that we have the nightmare of the Thailand-Cambodia crossing to compare it to. Straight away it was obvious that Brunei was far richer, and more religious, th...

OK, so it's almost exactly 2 months since we were actually in Sarawak, but I hate not finishing things, so much as I'd like to give this blog up as a bad job, I can't. Lucky I've kept a diary... We spent 3 weeks in Borneo in total, about half of that time in Sarawak (the southern part of Malaysian Borneo), mainly going from one national park to another, doing lots of trekking, and (see the photo) looking at orangutans! We started in Kuching, a really lovely rive...

After the backwater that was Cemero Lawang, we were so excited to arrive in Yogyakarta (pronounced Jogjakarta, normally just Jogja), a real city at last! We spent the four days we had there going for very long walks around the city, apparently confounding the becak (Indonesian tuktuk) drivers, who kept asking us where we were going and whether they could take us there. Batik was the word of the day in Jogja, with everyone trying to sell us some of the stuff - Go...