It’s been pretty much an uneventful day today. After getting up and expecting a walking tour of the city I’ve got to say that I’m feeling a little bit unsatisfied. Last night when I asked if anyone was going to go on the walking tour, everybody said no. They said that our leader walked too fast and didn’t really explain anything. I agreed, but I thought that he’d show us some cool stuff today. Guess what? They were right. So after less than an hour of walking to a town square and back to the hotel, I was sitting in Starbucks doing my usual “blog” thing.

Now I’m on a bus to Melaka, Malaysia. It’s supposed to take only about an hour and a half and we’ve been on the road for about twenty minutes. This quote comes straight out of Lonely Planet, “Lovers of beauty and food will become instantly intoxicated by the sultry charms of Melaka. The narrow streets of Chinatown exude small-town calm yet every cosmopolitan necessity is here, from funky cafés and eclectic art galleries to a diverse collection of restaurants and a congenial drinking scene. Beyond Chinatown, Melaka loses its soul to traffic, cement and over-sized shopping malls.” Maybe it will live up to the hype. I was told that it was a World Heritage site as well, that usually means good things…or interesting things.

On a secondary note, my plans for the rest of the summer are sketched in. The tour I’m on right now ends in two days when we get to Singapore. I stay an extra day there and then fly to Manila and travel around the Philippines for one week. Then I fly to Hong Kong for a week and then back to Dubai. I’ve got all the air tickets done, so that’s how I know that it’s sketched in. I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m at each location though. I heard Hong Kong is really expensive, so I may just stay in the hotel the whole time and eat from a convenience store.

I’m in Kuala Lumpur (KL) today. It is a big city in every way that I can think of. I’d like to say something more positive, but everything I’ve seen has been either massive amounts of people all rushing to go somewhere or a huge traffic jam that made us about an hour late. It wasn’t even one traffic jam, it was everywhere we went traffic was stalled, or nearly stalled.

We’re supposed to be going on a walking tour in a few minutes, but nobody is in the lobby of the hotel. I’m hoping that I have the time correct or I’m on my own the rest of the day.

This entry is being finished the next day.

It turned out that everyone slowly came down to the lobby except for our tour leader. After waiting for about an hour we decided to head out on our own, the first stop being KL Tower. The tower is about 500 meters high and is fairly well known. Fortunately our hotel is next to the monorail station and it only took about 20 minutes to get there, maybe a little bit longer. Even though there was a lot of smog in the air and visibility was not what I would consider good, the view was incredible. Especially the first time you look out the window, before your mind has time to adapt, it seems so surreal.

We had the idea of waiting until sunset to go up to the tower, the reasoning was that the Petronas Towers would be lit up. The problem with that was we got there about 5, and although we didn’t really know what time sunset was, at 7 we were pretty bored, so we left. I didn’t mention either that the tour leader showed up as we were waiting to go up the tower. He was stuck in traffic.

After the tower we walked back to Chinatown (where our hotel is) and had dinner. At that point I was really tired and just wanted to unwind with a beer, but I would feel that I would have failed on a trip to KL and not gotten close up to the Petronas Towers. So after dinner we headed out again to the PT.

I’m not sure if people know what I’m referring to when I mention PT, but I’m positive that everyone knows what they are when they see a photograph of them. Seeing the towers up close was another surreal moment. The bridge between them is massive and I don’t know if the photographs will do the view justice.

Today we head to Malaka (I think that’s the way it’s spelled) at 12 and I’m starting to run out of time so forgive me if there are errors in the post. I’m sure if you’ve been reading the blog you’ve seen dozens, maybe even hundreds of errors. Usually I don’t have time to edit the entries so they go as is… today is the same.

Great fun today! I started at about 8 at Starbucks with a latte. The plan was to be picked up for the half-day tour at 845. It seemed too perfect, 45 minutes to just read the news have a coffee and then take off for a fun filled extravaganza of a day.  I had signed up for the tour where we were having lunch yesterday. The price was less than what the hotel was charging, nevertheless when we got back to the hotel, the rest of the people I’m traveling with purchased it through the hotel. That’s okay.

So the van picked me up a little bit late and at one point I was worried that they were going to pick me up at all, so late was okay with me when they did show. The rest of the tour went fast and to be honest nothing spectacular happened, that is except for meeting some great people. There were two couples and a family in the van and all of them were interesting. The mother of the family had grown up in near Dubai and was now living in Copenhagen. What was funny was that she wants to move back to Dubai. That seems to happen to so many people, they leave and then try to get back. One couple was from Spain, (he was from England teaching English in Spain) and another was from, Slovenia, I think. Everyone on the van was great, even the driver was talkative.

The first stop was to look at some of the tea plantations, just the growing part of the plantation though, not the processing part. Then we went to the highest point in Malaysia, after that then to a moss forest. All of that was okay, the moss forest was more about walking around and that was good, but there wasn’t that much that I was really excited about. Our next stop was to the processing part of the tea plantation. Okay, seeing how tea is processed was a little bit interesting, things were getting better. Then we went to a strawberry farm. Meh. Finally before we were dropped off we went to a butterfly ranch… or something like that. Then they dropped those of us off that wanted to go hiking in the jungle. That’s where the fun began, and that was the absolute best time.

The trek took roughly about four hours and I know that there isn’t anything that I can say about how great it was at least that will properly transfer over to this blog.

Let me just say that I split with the group (inadvertently) and kind of got lost. I’ve mentioned this before that getting lost is not always bad, sometimes you see more when you don’t really know where you are. Anyway, I was never really scared kind of lost, there were trails everywhere and I knew that eventually I’d find my way to a road. In fact one trail ended into a parking lot or something, so I backtracked to the last turn off, about 1 km, and then went the opposite direction. Now that you know the overall, imagine the actual hiking part. There were parts that were almost straight up, and the only way you continue was by using the roots of the nearby trees as a ladder. There were times that the ground was nothing but mud, and still there were other times where it was hard to tell where the direction of path was supposed to go.

Because I made the mistake of getting separated by the group I had a secondary goal of finding them. I was doing the tracking thing, a broken branch, so I must be on the right path. We all know that it could have been anyone who broke it, but that didn’t matter. There’s a footprint in the mud they can’t be more than a couple minutes ahead of me now.  Not only was the whole experience fun, but it was probably the toughest trekking that I’ve ever done. Seriously, there were parts that seemed impassable, but were obviously not.

So I ran into a family and asked them where the trail ended, they told me what the sign of the trail had said, so that didn’t help. They did tell me that some Spanish people had just passed them, so I knew I was on the right track. Not more than fifteen minutes later the trail ended into a cabbage farm. I followed the trail by some workers, past a tent, and finally down to the road. The group was waiting down at the bottom. It was so nice to see them.

I’m sitting in the front seat of the bus that’s taking us to Cameron Highlands. I know, what is a “Cameron Highlands?” As names go, it sure doesn’t seem to roll off the tongue. Anyway, we’ve been on the road for about 20 minutes and we’re still in the city, I’m starting to think that Malaysia is nothing but one big city? Our tour leader told everyone that it is very possible that if we are prone to carsickness that the second two hours of the trip today we will probably be sick. Not a good way to start off, but what can you do?

Five hours later and I’m here at Cameron Highlands with no carsickness, so that was a good thing. The tour leader took us around the city and up to view a waterfall. The town is really small, so small that you could probably walk it in less than thirty minutes. Tomorrow I’m going on a tour of the area. I don’t really want to go into all of the things now, but I’ll be going on a 3-hour trek through the jungle that will be visiting a tea plantation and other things.

Today went as planned, we went to the old fort, then to a museum. After that the leader let us do whatever we wanted, so basically it was a free day. I decided to go for a walk. It’s something that I like to do to get a feel of a city. Walks like these usually take a few hours and I usually don’t stop very often. Today though I had the secondary purpose of finding somewhere that wifi. It seems that there are internet cafes nearly everywhere, but no wifi cafes. I did eventually find a Coffee Bean shop that had free wifi and I made the most of it. I think I was there for at least two hours just updating the blog mostly, and of course drinking coffee.

Tonight was an early night since we’re leaving and going up into the mountains about 9am tomorrow. We’ve been warned that many people get carsick on the route that we’re traveling too.