Singapore and Malaysia

Wow SG is amazing! The culture the city the people the foods the atmosphere! SG is a small but safe clean and friendly city/ country with lots to do and see. We Flew from perth to SG and landed at 10pm and we go stuck straight in with figuring out how to get to our hostel. Luckly everything is in english as its a widly spoken language. Our hostel is called sleepy sams, its a nice asian style hostel located in a high muslim area with SG's biggest mosque just 30mtrs away! So at 5.30am and 7.30pm we have the muslim alah preech! very loud but very creepy,but treatred with the up most respect as we are in there country now. With no shoes to be worn in the hostel or rooms or dorms its run by two SG's ladys and its our cool clean haven in a sticky hot SG!

So for the last two days we have been walking and eating so much!! buts it so cheap and easy to find good food! Apparently quite expensive for Asia but compared to over rated Oz its bliss. Our first full day started with a train ride straight into the city centre and a visit to Chinatown. There are lots of original old buildings around this area, along with Buddhist and Hindu temples. We visited both temples. In the Hindu temple there were food offerings everywhere and incense burning everywhere but everyone there was smiling and happy. The Buddhist temple was very very grand with lots of gold everywhere. You could buy your own Buddha Shrine for as little as SGD 6000 or even SGD 35,000. We decided to save that for another day!! Leah had to wear long skirt and pashmina to cover and exposed skin apart from her face. We stopped for a chinese lunch which was the best chinese we had had in ages! and a beer, just in time for the massive thunderstorm and heavy rain. We watched for about an hour and decided umbrellas were the only way we were going to get around so we bought two for $5 each, it is the rainy season afterall. Besides it is that hot that it doesnt really matter if you get wet. So we headed back to the hostel for a quick cold shower and we were back out for tea about 9pm in little india! I had butter chicken curry and leah ate all of the naan bread!! We were probably the only white people apart from one or two dotted around. It was good, we felt like we were fully submerged into the culture. Its funny how one area of the same country can be so diverse from the next.

The next day we headed to Raffles Hotel, named after Sir Stamford Raffles who landed in Singapore in 1819. Here is where the cocktail the Singapore Sling was invented we could of had one for about $200 but that was a lot of food and a bed for a week so we gave it a miss and just wiped our dribble and walked on!. We were also tempted to partake in High Tea here but the cost put us off slightly! $40 slightly... It is a lovely hotel though with the famous Sikh valets and butlers. We went to a Hawker centre which is basically a food market where you can buy really cheap food. We had a few dim sum and noodles etc and a couple of Tiger beers of course, hic hic we got drunk, s owith a full belly we staggered back to our hostle in the 35c ans 100% humidity at 11pm!!zzzzzzzz


Our third day here we headed to the Harbourfront and took a cable car to Sentosa Island. The views on the cable car were amazing. We could see all of the loading bays and about 800 shipping containers in which/was one of the biggest shipping yards in the worldand one played an imprtant roll in the import and export of goods and links back once when the brithish empire was in full swing. It was so so busy. When we arrived it was very touristy. Everything once you are on the island costs. We decided to take a short walk around and the hop back onto the cable car. The ride on this alone was worth coming to Sentosa.

The next day we took the MRT, their underground train around for some exploring. As we were on the escalator towards the platform our train was about to leave. Alex decided to make a run for it. He made in on.......Leah was a bit behind. She got her umbrella through the door before they closed. As the umbrella was tied around her wrist an emergency tug was required, the umbrella snapped and the MRT sped off with Alex on it and Leah looking lost.... Luckily another train arrived 10 minutes later and a hysterical reunion was had at the other end. Please be aware the MRT doors will close no matter what is in between them!! So we headed in to the very centre of ML to see where on one side of the river is the old ML and on the other side is the modern ski scrapers divided by only a small river. We spent hours wondering and exploring and as it got darker the city came to life in a mass of neon lights, lady boys, resturants and music.

Our journey to Malaysia was to be made on a coach. It had to be said a very nice coach with big reclining seats. It took us 6 hours to get to Kuala Lumpur. We had two immigration stops before heading in Malaysia. The drive was relaxed on quite motorways, until we approached KL. It was just a quagmire of unmoving traffic and constant beeps of horns. After 7 hours on an air con bus the heat hit us like walking into an oven. It took us about half an hour to find our hostel. The hostel itself was very nice and the staff were very friendly. It was totally different arriving here though. Being a muslim country, there were women dressed in full burkha clothes. Leah was getting a fair bit of male attention here as she was blonde, fair skinned and dressed in western clothes. The Malaysian government recently attempted to bring in death by stoning for adultery here, which thankfully wasn't accepted by the public but it just shows how strict a muslim country it is. They follow the Sharia Law.

Behind our hostel, just in view as we showered everyday was a group of ladyboys, trying to earn a days wage!!! The tight miniskirts and stilletos weren't very convincing though!! I think Alex had a wink or two!!!(at him not to them i might add) KL was quite dirty and very smelly. The sewers were just open ditches at the sides of the roads. There were rats everywhere. Spitting very noisily as if you are hocking somethig up from the pit of your stomach is also very common everywhere. You have to try and switch off from it as you are eating your food. One waitress did it in full view of a restaurant in the sink for people to wash their hands in. It was hard not to let your disgust show as to them it is perfectly normal, but we didnt eat there again!

We only had two days in KL so we did the usual chinatown tour, which was another experience. People almost chase you round the market trying to get you to buy one of their 'rolex' watches and 'Gucci' bags! We got up early at 6.45am to get to the Petronas Towers to queue for the tickets to go up. We went up at 10.30am. You can only go as high as the skybridge though which is about halfway up but the views are still amazing. As we only had two days we did as much as we could and hit up bars ,pubs, clubs, shops and as much culture as we could stomach!But the cheapest one was always culture as all you had to do was walk in the local remote areas!
So one day we jumped on a local bus and fumbled through with some basic local lingo and broken english and headed to the Batu caves a masive hindu shrine in a cave the size of old trafford! I was a grand thing to see but sadly we were typical tourists for a moment and were happy to watch and take pictures of the wild monkeys playing and drinking out of bottles like little humans sad hey!! Note: I had to drag Leah away!

After KL we took a night train to Penang further north in Malaysia. We didnt sleep much even though we had a bed as the train was so old and rickety and noisyand we had to sleep with our bag on our beds as they could be nicked.Again we were the only westerners on the train so everybody was looking as per usual but we didnt mind. We arrived at 5.30am in a place called buttersworth and had to find the local ferry andcatch it accross to the island of Penang and head to Georgetown. Georgetown is not the best place to be at 5am!! so we looked for saftey in a cafe or anything with a security guard but had to make do with a busy bus stop instead! When we made it to our hostel it was dinghy, like a prison cell, the toilets were downstairs in the cafe's kitchen!!!! We didnt sleep that well here either as we were on a really noisy road. We didnt do much here. To be honest we didn't like it and also didnt feel safe at all so we cut it a day short and headed to Thailand on a 10 seater minibus. yee ha!!