A South-East Asian Adventure

Well after a pretty epic journey by land up the west coast of Malaysia, we finally made it to the ferry port of Kuala Perlis. Our destination? The island of Langkawi. We though that we had put the beaches behind us and that our reputation as 'island hoppers' had been laid to rest, but it was about to be revived!
The boat took a little over an hour, and it was a pretty surreal experience. As the engine was kick started a film began to play on the numerous television screens around the boat. We thought, judging the time (9.30am) and the audience (a mix of ages, mostly families, variety of religions) that the film would be easy going and child friendly. You can understand our surprise when the film title came up; "The Thing". Not even half way through our journey the first person was dragged away by the terrifying creature. I'm sure that some of the children on that boat won't have slept for days!
Our guest house was located at the opposite side of the island, and so the taxi journey enabled us to get a good view of the rest of the island on the way. As we neared Zachery's Guest House, the area looked pretty quiet. To be honest, it stayed pretty quiet but the visit was really enjoyable. To say that Langkawi was in its peak season, and our accommodation was fully booked, it was surprising that apart from the beaches, it was all pretty quiet. It was no Koh Tao, or Koh Samui where it was impossible to go five minutes without seeing another Western face.
Most of our time on the island was pretty chilled. The guy (Sam) at the guest house was really friendly and would get all the guests together for chat and/or drinking games in the evening. Its the friendliest place we have stayed so far on our trip in terms of meeting other guests. Sam arranged for seven of us to go out for the afternoon/evening on one of the days. We hired a car which he drove and we went to the far end of the island to monkey beach and had a picnic. It got its name for a reason, and I acquired some strange looks when I ran out of the sea (do you know how hard it is to run through water?) screaming as a monkey was trying to run off with our bag. Luckily, not to the credit of the rest of our group, the monkey only managed to nab off with an old soft drink can that we had finished with. Vicky: One. Monkey: Nil.

It was a nice little beach, despite the constant threat of theft from the cheeky monkeys. The fuel for our beach BBQ was simple, in the form of old coconut shells- genius idea! So much cheaper than our charcoal back home! \

After our little visit to the beach, we went the night food market. You may have all been able to gather from previous blog posts, that the two of us are becoming quite partial to such places! CHEAP AND DELICIOUS!

From Langkawi we moved to Penang, another island on the west coast of Malaysia. We were really excited about the food there as we had heard lots of great things about it. And we did eat quite a lot! We got a travel map of food ( I should point out that we didn't go out of our way to find it, it was in the hotel!) and Phil made it his mission to try and work his way through it (I would have, but there was an awful lot of fish/shrimp on there!). Malaysia is a country with three major groups, Indian, Malay and Chinese and so whilst we were there we ate a great blend of the three.
What else did we do... its been a while since we were there (Im writing ths from Vietnam!)! We stayed in George Town for around 5 days. We made great use of their public buses (cheap and efficient!) and visited the botanical gardens, the Burmese temple, saw Malaysia's largest reclining Buddha and sent an evening at the Kek Lok Si temple, which was strung up in fairy lights for the 15 days of Chinese New Year. It was a very impressive sight, a combination of beautiful and tacky, but stunning (see below).

We also made use of our legs and did a DIY walking tour (similar to the one we did in Phuket, Thailand) using a map of the city that included details of the various stops we should check out and went to the museum there and found out all about the didn't ethnic groups who lived in Penang.
On our last night (in Penang AND Malaysia!)we attended Chinese Valentines (6th Feb) where we saw the Mayor (we think he was the Mayor... he was very important/popular!). It is tradition for young single women to throw oranges into the sea (to bring a man? We aren't really sure of the details...) however on the night, EVERYONE was throwing oranges into the sea, they had set up some painted billboards of women (goddesses? Again the details are foggy) just off shore and people were trying to get the orange into the goddess' basket. It was interesting to see, but it did seem like a big waste of nice oranges (I think the price of oranges on Penang must have shot up the following day!). As well as the orange throwing, there was a big stage set up and there were performances on all night. There was an amazing lion dance on stilts. Absolutely fantastic, but I'm sorry to tell our blog fans that we were too far away to get pictures. The evening was a lot of fun, it had a great atmosphere, however the evening came to an early close for us when the heavens decided to open. We heard the fireworks sounding in the distance though when we got back to our room, so it can't have stopped everyone in their tracks. Leaving early was probably a good thing, we had an early flight booked to Medan on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, the following day.

First impressions of Kuala Lumpur? Wow. We were taken from arrivals to pick up our baggage by TRAIN. Yes, a train INSIDE an AIRPORT. It was really wierd driving through and seeing...well airport life, going by. We even drove through where the planes were parked, ready to load with their passengers.
From there, we got the airport express train into the city of the city. We were dazzled by the lights of the skyscrapers, it was completely different to anything that we'd previously witnessed on the trip; driving along on a high-tec train looking at the business centre of such a huge city go by.
The bubble of awe lasted until around the time we got to our hostel. We checked in, went up to our room (on the fourth floor, no stairs, very steep incline)... our room was a bare concrete square. With blood stains on the bottom sheet and no cover, there was also a small ant colony claiming the far wall of the room. We were both tired and grumpy, and suddenly just wanted to be back in Thailand. The ant colony was soon sorted out with a few sprays of deet (anti-mosi spray). And we got the sheet swapped the next day. And with that we fell asleep (I was convinced that there would be bed bugs, it had all of the characteristics of a place that would surely have the critters... luckily we weren't bitten to shreds during the night. Perhaps I misjudged their levels of cleanliness after all...hmm).
We were convinced that there had to be better accommodation out there, and there probably was. But it was Chinese new year and everywhere that was half decent had a full house. So, naively we moved to a 'bed & breakfast' after two nights in the first hostel. Granted, there number of ants in our room was vastly reduced, we had a bed sheet and a towel was provided. For around twenty rooms, there were two showers and one of these included the only working toilet. There were some lengthy waiting with legs crossed for several of the guests. And breakfast? Breakfast was 8-10am. We turned up at around 9am... there was no one around, and a random bag of bread on the table with three slices in it. And lets not forget the jar of jam. That was it. Bed and Breakfast.

Okay, so I admit that I am painting a really bad picture of the city when actually we enjoyed our visit. Just not the sorry excuses foraccommodation which we ended up finding.

The city is one of the greenest in the world and we spent a couple of days its exploring parks etc. We visited the Lake Gardens, where there is a deer park (unfortunately closed when we went, but we could see the deer from outside the gate), and of course, a huge lake which had lots of turtles floating around. KL alo has a clump of ancient forest (i think its about 10 hectares) and we explored part of this. Right next to it is Menara KL (or KL Tower) which is a huge tower which you can pay to go up and visit its viewing platform. We went up it one evening after sunset to see the city's lights. It was very pretty, although the elevator up and down was pretty horrible. Im not sure about Phil but my ears popped several times- it's over 250m tall, and its located on a hill, so its pretty impressive!

We also went to see the petronas twin towers; just from outside as we didn't want to pay to go up to the viewing platform after Menara KL. We did look around the shopping centre at the base of one of the towers however and it really hit home how HUGE the towers are.

We imagined before we went that staying in the chinese quarter of the city would hopefully mean we would see lots of celebrations for chinese new year. We were a little disapointed that this wasn't the case, however we did see lots of fantastic decorations and some lion dances.

The photo below was taken from the Pavilion shopping centre. I think it may have broken the record for the size of its dragon. It was a fantastic sight!

In addition to the CNY decorations the shopping centre also had the 'Buddy Bear Tour' displayed outside its main entranc. The display consisted of over one hundred bear statues, from countries all over the world. Each had taken a staue and decorated it in its own unique style. The bears are touring the world to promote unity and peace. It was a very pleasing surprise to stumble across it. Some of the bears were absolutely stunning! Great Britain's was...interesting... not the most beautiful but definitely an interesting concept!

And once again... we are out of time... we will try and get round to updating again soon. We are currently in Indonesia after spending two weeks in Malaysia so there's definitely a lot to write about. Recently we have either been very busy or very far away from the internet and so haven't had chance to blog!

I feel like I should stand up for myself here, although I didn't go SNORKELLING at Coral Island, did actually spend longer in the water than Phil (even if I spent most of it screaming from being so close to jellyfish). But anyway! On with our journey...

We had planned to move around Phuket Island and stay along different beaches, but for the money our hotel was lovely and the transport to different areas of the island was so cheap so we stayed in Phuket town. After the jellyfish incident we decided against anymore organised tours, and we had a great time exploring on our own.
We found a 'walking tour' map of Phuket town and spent a day looking at all the different sino-portugese (chinese and portugese heritage) sites. The town has some really lovely history and two of the streets in particular, were stunning, and we spent a lot of our evenings sat along them, with various drinks/meals.We actually had a really good day exploring, its amazing how much more interesting it can be when you actually know what it is you are looking at! We also managed to miss most of the random bouts of rain that day in various coffee shops/restaurants. It cleared up in the late afternoon and we went up one of the big hills in the town, from the restaurant at the top, sat with a nice cold drink, we could see two of the Islands beaches and bays. It was really beautiful.

Whilst on Phuket we also went to Karon beach, we thought it was going to be nice and quiet however we we surprised to see hundred of very neatly positioned sun loungers when we arrived. It wasn't quite the hideaway we expected but we had fun in the huge waves; there were lots of people in the water trying to jump with the tide. And we also went to Rawai beach, this time it was much quieter, with only a few handfuls of individuals and random fishing boats. We went for a walk through the hillside, taking in the lovely view and getting to see 'Thai life'.

To say we didn't want to go to Phuket at the start of our trip, and only went due to circumstance and flights, we actually really enjoyed the island. It is so varied, I think we could have easily have spent longer there. Adding to our love of Phuket town in particular, was the fact that we found a restaurant where our meals were accompanied by a large bottle of Chang which cost a POUND! It was the cheapest we had see it on our travels. Bargain! The fact that it is pretty potent stuff (over 6%) and was being mixed with our good friend doxycycline was conveniently pushed to one side for a few evenings. :D

We had our flight booked to Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, late afternoon on Saturday 21st January. We were both really sad to leave Thailand, it's a really easy country to get to grips with and we had a fantastic three and a half weeks there.

13th January 2012

As mentioned earlier, it became apparent pretty quickly that there really wasn't that much to see or do in Krabi town itself. We had organised a full day snorkling / island excursion, dubbed the "4 Islands" Tour. Mainly because of the 4 different islands we were taken to throughout the day.

First off, we were dropped off a unique collection of two islands and a larger island. The two smaller islands were connected by a 75m strip of golden sand. We were told we could reach the third larger island, Chicken Island (named so because it looks like a chicken (maybe more a Turkey we thought) from the side. We took a photo but it hasn't been uploaded yet but this is what it looked like: http://www.travelthaihotel.com/images/tourist/001.jpg ), by walking the 100m through the sea as the tide was low. It tooks a small while to make our way through the knee-high water. Upon our return back to the boat, we realised why they had insisted we brought our life jackets with us for the walk - the water was now approaching neck height as the tide raced in. And to think we nearly brought our bag full of valuables with us too!

Next, we saw another part of Chicken Island, where we were able to snorkle for about 45 minutes. There wasn't as much variety in the fish that we saw (it was predominantly these yellow-with-black-stripes fish), but there were thousands of them swimming all around us - once again a fantastic experience, and at least Vicky managed to spend some time looking at the fishes this time! The underwater camera took some great shots, but they are still to be uploaded so unfortunately you'll have to wait for those

We were taken to another island beach, which was beatiful for around 15 minutes. And then it proceeded to rain torrentially for the next 2 hours. Our final beach, Hat Ray Leh was pretty breathtaking - a mish mash of sheer cliff faces and limestone islands mixed with beach and boat restaurants. Unfortunately, it did continue to rain while we were there, but it had at least subsided somewhat by then so all was not lost.

We were tipped off earlier in the day by someone we got chatting to on the snorkling trip about the location of the actual night market. So in the evening, we made our way over there to see what it was like. And we were not disappointed. "Kids in a Sweetshop" was a phrase that cropped up days later upon discussing the hours we spent there. After a starter of a chicken kebab skewer, we moved swiftly on to a freshly made chicken donner kebab, while dessert was, of course, our new found favourite, the "Fried coconut milk sphere things." However, Vicky was not impressed by the surprise appearance of sweetcorn and chicken in the center of them, nor the absence of sugar. "Tomorrow we are going back where we got them yesterday" I was told.

14th January 2012

Today we didn't do much. Attempted to wonder round a nearby temple, but it was shut. We spent most of the day counting down until we could once again visit the night market and try something new.

And that we did.

Spring rolls. Not just normal spring rolls. Multi-coloured spring rolls. Once blue, one white, and one green. As they were handed to us, they were still soft to touch, only mildly warm, and no deep fried crispiness to be seen. Assuming that we had been given a raw batch that had somehow escaped the wrath of the deep fat fryer, we proceeded to eat anyway.

As it turned out, they had in fact been cooked, and once dipped in the accompanying sauce were actually really delicious. Result.

We also tried another traditional Thai dish, a cuisine that dates back thousands of years. The Corndog.

Okay, so maybe it isn't particularly "Thai" food, but we were intrigued. And it was pretty nice - basically a hotdog wrapped in layer upon layer of pancake.

We also had our "Fried coconut milk sphere things" from the place we initially bought them from. They came with sugar, and there was no sweetcorn to be seen.

15th January 2012

Today we moved from Krabi to Phuket, the last place we are visiting in Thailand before we move south to Malaysia. It would leave us with a week on Phuket Island before our pre-booked flight. In retrospect, now knowing this we would have spent a bit more time in a few of the different places we have visited over the last couple of weeks. But we were here now so we were working out how we could make the most of it.

The driver of the minibus was just mental. I think it's safe to say that we spent more time in the opposite lane of traffic overtaking mopeds and tuk tuks than on the correct side of the road. Averaging a speed of around 70mph, on mountain roads with a 40mph limit, in a rackety old minibus that I would have guessed had a top speed of 30mph was impressive. Impressive and terrifying.

But we made it in once piece. All was well.

The hotel was lovely, probably the best we've stayed in on our travels so far. And for just over 5GBP a night (inc. a breakfast of omelet, toast, sausages and unlimited coffee!) we were pretty happy with ourselves.

16th January 2012

We wanted to find ourselves another snorkling day trip excursion. So we set about doing so . In amongst all the over-priced tuk tuks and taxis, we found a little bus station where you can get to pretty much anywhere on Phuket island for minimal price. for just over 1GBP return, we took the bus (I say bus, we were still sat in the back of a pickup truck style vehicle, but this is all slowly becoming the norm for us now. We must have been here too long...)

We visited Chlong Bay, where we found a bargain (half the price of anywhere else we saw) 20GBP snorkling day trip to Coral Island, just off the coast of Phuket. "Multiple species of live coral... snorkel with hundreds of tropical fish" the leaflet read...

17th January 2012.

Jellyfish everywhere. Nowhere, nowhere was there any mention of jellyfish in the leaflet!! Coral Island has a lovely long sweeping postcard style beach, with crystal clear seas. It was just such a shame that seemingly all of it was just full of jellyfish. Big ones, small ones, tiny ones, huge ones. Everywhere you looked. And there they were - hundreds of other people just swimming, diving snorkling away in amongst these jellyfish, not a care in the world.

Not for us. Between us, in the entire day there was in total 4 minutes snorkling. 4m for me (before being stung on the lip), and 0m for Vicky. 20GBP well spent...

Sawasdee!

Phil left our blog on the 10th January, just after feeding the elephants and watching the beautiful sunset....

11th January- third day in Khao Sok

We really wanted to arrange a snorkeling day trip for the day however it was unbelievably expensive to get to the Similian islands (beautiful islands off the coast- took several hours to get there so the price of transport was higher) and we decided to forgo the professionally arranged tours and go it alone through the beach/jungle combination which laid before us. We walked the other way down the beach (from the day before) and explored some of the rocks and waves down a quieter strand of beach. Towards the end of the beach we found a few large hotel resorts and we used their stairs to climb up the side of the big hill on to the road which swept through the jungle side. We had no plan of action but to keep walking- which was a great plan but we forgot to bring any lunch and were enjoying ourselves too much to go back. Just a little walk on, we found a temple to the god of Khao Lak, and saw our first huge spider- we both moved quickly on. Then we decided to go into the the Khao Lak national park (it cost about two pounds)... without food it was a bit of a mammoth challenge. The walk was a few km in length so we decided not to go the whole way (we'd have to walk it back!) and made do with going down on the rocks by the sea to see the 'mystical footprint' which was cordoned off on the rocks. Then we climbed back up into the jungle (i was terrified of being bitten, we hadn't come dressed for trekking and I appear to by a walking bug menu!), which was really pretty, and then back down to the 'view point'. This was like a natural platform of rocks but from there you could see all of the coast line along which we have been walking over the last two days. Khao Lak, as I think Phil mentioned, was one of the worst hit places in 2004 tsunami, and it was very thought-provoking to sit there and think about what that fateful day must have been like for the locals.
After the viewpoint we gave up and headed back to civilization for food.

12th Jan- leaving Khao Lak for Krabi (Grab-ee)

We set off that morning from Khao Lak to Krabi at 8am... and were surprised to arrive in Krabi at 10.30am! Unfortunately however... (drum roll) we didnt get dropped off IN Krabi.... we were plonked in the middle of no where and had to pay for a private taxi to get us to the hotel (the taxi drivers have a pretty cushy set up!) ...however... we can't complain when even then the journey cost about a tenner! We had still covered some distance!

We didn't know what to expect from the hotel... we had found it in the Lonely Planet book, but for 7 pounds a night (for both of us) we were a little dubious. We had nothing to worry about it- it was nothing fantastic, but it was clean and there was a fan and hot shower so we were very happy!

What to say of Krabi Town.... it was pretty dead. A very sleepy little town. It was nice to stay there to have some down time but to be honest there's not much exciting to tell you about our days spent wandering around there. We walked around on that first day to get our bearing and as we were passing this shop front a women started screaming. We looked on intrigued and were both very shaken to see a HUGE brown spider come flying at us. It was bigger than a hand. We practically ran away and were pleased that we managed to miss it.

That evening we went to what we thought was Krabi's night market- it was smaller than we expected but it still have several street stalls which had laid out tables and chairs. A pretty amazing little set up really! We had skewers for starters, noodles and chicken, strawberry smoothies and then... we discovered the awesomeness that is fried coconut milk. They come in little balls and we had them with sugar. They are lovely- crispy on the outside but form and squidy on the inside. We are a little bit hooked now (after having that each of out three nights in Krabi) and are on the look out for our next hit!

Ah, alas! Our time is up again and the mission is a failure... we still aren't up to date Never mind... hopefully we will be back on soon (WITH PHOTOS!).

Just a quick note: we are amazed at how many people are reading this blog, and are glad that you seem to be enjoying it. We will try to keep up with it as often as possible

Love,

Vicky and Phil x