Hi, and thanks to everyone for sending us their worst bathroom experiences. That's been fun reading. Keep those cards and letters coming! I love bathroom stories.

We took the slow bus (not the bus for slow people, simply a slow bus) to the Cameron Highlands after leaving Kuala Lumpur. Considering that the highlands are around 1500m, you'd think they'd coax one of the newer buses into service for that route but we were in some ancient Hino. It kind of reminded me of driving in Leo (our VW van). Sometimes a guy actually needs more than 4 gears and 30 year old technology. You do get to see a lot of the history of Malaysia right out the window of your bus as you travel. Along the way we saw the rubber tree plantations that brought/bring the Malaysians some of their wealth. We saw open pit tin mines. Tin is why KL is the capital - something I had always wondered as it's kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's quite devastating to see all of the palm plantations. They're beautiful but they've basically ripped out rainforest to plant the palm trees to provide bio-diesel fuel, but as you can imagine, this doesn't do much for the biodiversity of the landscape, and I'm not just talking about one or two plots, we've seen them all the way from the south, through to the north. In the highlands, the big deal seems to be hydroponic operations of strawberries and tomatoes. Lots of crops grown under fluorescent lights as well. Seems weird in such a lush country and warm climate. Tea is the big thing where we were and we visited a plantation. If a guy had a couple bucks to invest, I'd throw it in tea. Now knowing the "process" of making tea, for what they charge in the store for 10 little sachets of tea it must be all profit. The entire factory was about twice the size of our house. All you have to do is pick-it, smush it around and around, dry it, sift it and bag it. Done! I'll run some preliminary figures and do up the IPO paperwork...stay tuned.

Next we headed up to Langkawi, and island in the north that, being just a ferry ride from Thailand, was overrun with people in limbo waiting to see if the Bangkok airport was going to reopen. We did manage to get a room, and quite a cute little bungalow too. I think this was the first time in 4 weeks that we actually had a toilet in our own room. So much more enjoyable to not have to get all dressed up in the middle of the night just to relieve our aging bladders. The beach in Langkawi was quite nice, but they've cut down a lot of the waterfront trees to make way for developments so unless you're one of the hearty Europeans that are career tanners, we just couldn't cook ourselves there so we busied ourselves with duty-free beer, a day of exploring the island on our scooter and our favourite pastime - eating.

The food here is really good. There's a fair bit of variety as Indians, Chinese and ethnic Malays all reside here and have some great dishes. We are, however, concerned about getting scurvy. They're not so big on fruit & veg. Not only in restaurants and street vendors but even at markets we've been struggling to find anything green. A typical breakfast for us now consists of a couple bananas, some milk (when we can find some that isn't sweetened) but it's almost always UHT milk and Hobnobs or Sweetmeal digestive biscuits (this has become our substitute for fibre). Long gone are the days of organic fruit, yogurt & cereal. We even bought some multi-vitamins as meat and noodles or rice only get you so far. There's a reason that these people are shorter than westerners - nutrients my friends, nutrients.

One of our favourite quirks here are how they try to get someone's attention. At home we whistle, or say yoo-hoo. Here they make this juicy kissing sound twice. It's very alarming when someone does that to you for the first time. Now we break into giggle fits when we try to get each others attention.

We're actually back in Kuala Lumpur now and will fly to Siem Reap in Cambodia tomorrow. We booked the flight when the Bangkok airport was kerfuffled as we thought it best to steer clear of that trouble. It took 11 hours, 1 taxi, 1 ferry, 2 local buses and a long distance bus to get us here. I'm gonna drop a note in the Thai suggestion box when we get there in a couple weeks, I can assure you of that!

I think that's it friends. Keep your stick on the ice and we'll catch you soon,

Jason & Baebs