Malaysia

Newyears' eve in Penang wasn't so exiting after all. Although there were thousands of people on the beach promenade and there was a massive stage for bands to perform, unfortunately there were hardly any fireworks at all. Most of the crowd left short after midnight and so did we. We were tired from travelling anyway and couldn't wait to get to bed.

The next day we hopped on the bus to the Cameron Highlands which are situated south of Penang, about 200 km north east of Kuala Lumpur.

Cameron Highlands are famous for the mild climate (about 24 degrees) and tea - actually 80% of the area belong to a Scottish tea company.

But to Malays it is also well known for cultivating strawberries, which must be very exciting for them. You can find strawberries just everywhere: printed on billboards, as massive plastic replicas in front of shops and most of the time in combination with images of scorpions and other insects which are about 10 times the size then any insect in Europe! We went to visit them in a butterfly farm (butterflies here have a span width of as much as 15 cm (5 inches)! Other creepy animals we saw here were bullfrogs, snakes and tarantulas. To relax we went to a flower garden afterwards.
Actually we also planned to go hiking the other day but Julia forgot her USB disk in the Internet cafe and we had to go back the most boring bit off the track. We couldn't be asked to start a second try so we spent the rest of the day in our guest house, watching films ; )

After 2 days we headed on to Kuala Lumpur, to catch our plane to Manila, Philippines. Unfortunately we planned only 1 day for this amazing city which could have kept us busy for another 2 days easily! We spent some time strawling on the night market in the chinese quarter but could resist the temptation of buying any fake stuff - although Rolex watches were really cheap! For about 10 - 20 Euros you can get an automatic one which will last at least 14 days!
The shopping malls however were really impressive - one of them even had a rollercoaster going through one part of it!

We flew to the Philippines at 2 o' clock in the morning and arrived merely 4 hours later in Manila. Totally sleep drunk we continued our trip with a 6 hours journey by bus to San Fernando to go surfing. More on San Fernando and how we got on with surfing and with the Philippinos next time.

The next day we visited yet another budhist temple called Kek Lok Si, just a bit outside from Penang. It seems to be one of the largest budhist temples in Asia and was very impressive.

We did go to the Chinese opera, lion and dragon dance and drums show. It was just brilliant as you can see on the photos below!

We were even allowed to go backstage - well, let's not dramatize it, it was only a mobile stage and the setting was pretty basic. But still, it was a great experience to see traditional Chinese opera, dance and drum performences from so nearby!

Our Chinese guide was able to tell us basically everything we wanted to know about the chinese culture. However we didn't stay the entire night as we were still a bit weak from our illnesses and especially the noise of the happening (for some time it seemed like opera and lion dance sound systems were fighting each other!) but were able to enjoy most of it.

In the end we decided to go directly to Malaysia. Krabi would have been just another nice beach probably a bit more crowded than Ko Tao ('same same but different' - as Thais would say).
So we spent a few more days on this beautiful island, had a swim every morning in our hotel pool, relaxed on the beached and hung out in cafes.

Frank went diving once but unfortunately got ill after that. Basically we were hanging around on the island for the last two days suffering from headaches and sore throats (Julia) and flue and bunged up sinuses (Frank).

Still we did enjoy our stay on the island, as less tourists were on Ko Tao the heavier the storms got at sea. After about 4 days on Ko Tao we moved on to Malaysia with quite a spectacular boat/train trip. We started off by ferry from Ko Tao to Chumphorn on 2-3 meter waves (1/3 of the passengers onboard got sick while Julia was only dreaming of surfing). After that we hopped on a bus that brought us to Chumphorn train station (nothing much exciting about neither Chumphorn nor the trainstation apart from a little night market we visited).

The nighttrain took us to Butterworth in Malaysia in just 15 hours. Luckily we booked beds - at least until 6 am when the single beds all off a sudden converted to 2 persons seats. We think the nighttrain was a good option to get from Thailand to Malaysia. The beds were comfortable and if we had felt better (headache wise) we certainly would have slept for the entire journey.

Anyway, Malaysia is great so far. At the moment we are in Penang where we already did part of the standard tourist duties (taking photos and visiting 4 of the 3124 temples, churches and mosques). The best things we experienced were a chat with an administrator of a chinese clan temple. He invited us to their family opera, dragon dance, drums and kung fu show which will take place tomorrow night, as long as we don't tell his furious grand mother! And Julia who, we are happy to announce, turned to islam - congratulations! (well, at least for our visit in Captain Keling Mosque)

More on Malaysia and then Sumatra (where we will scare the shit out of orang utans by showing them Frank) soon in a blog near your computer.