Kuala Lumpur

Our two days in Kuala Lumpur have been enjoyable. We've been traipsing around and are a little footsore now. It would be worth spending some more time in the city to see some of the other sights besides China Town and the Petronas Towers. Beau and I are confident we will be returning to Kuala Lumpur at some point. We wish to explore the east coast where there is supposedly good diving.

Dec 23 – Kuala Lumpur China Town

We arrived in Kuala Lumpur this morning at 4:45am. Ugggh, I cat napped a little on the bus but not nearly enough. Our hotel was very easy to find though and they let us check in early. We had booked 2 beds in a 6 bed dorm but those beds were full that night so they put us in a 2 bunk room. So we still got a private room and early check in for the same price. We went to sleep for a few hours and woke up again around 9 or 10. Our hotel provides breakfast of toast and coffee so we made use of that. While eating we met a Jamaican girl, Fae, who has been teaching English in Japan for 2 years. We had a nice chat with her and then finally got our acts together to explore around 1pm. Our hotel is situated in China town. All the signs are in Chinese and English, there are Chinese book stores all over and to make it perfectly a China town there is a street full of stalls hawking knock off products. You can buy Louis Vuitton purses, Gucci sunglasses, and soccer jerseys. It's what you would expect from any China town, although not really what you find in China. We had some lunch and then continued onward towards to Central Market. This was mostly tourist items but still quite expansive. I picked myself up a purse though. Beau's on the look out for a new book, so we went into a couple of used book stores but they were quite overpriced for what they were. We head back to the hotel to give our feet a rest. There is quite a nice common area with couches and a big flat screen TV. Later we went for dinner and then headed back into the China town market which had doubled in size (really there were double the number of shops in the same area). I picked up a new tank top and t-shirt and Beau got a Spain football jersey. Back at the hotel we made ourselves some instant 3-in-1 coffee and did some computer work. We also saw the end of Horrible Bosses which looked pretty funny. We'll have to watch it from the beginning sometime.

China Town Street Market

Dec 24 – Christmas time in the City

After some peanut butter and jam on toast for breakfast, we hopped on the metro to head to the Petronas Towers. These are the famous two towers in KL that have a large sky bridge connecting them. I think they are the ones from the movie Entrapment. We were thinking about going up the the sky bridge but it cost almost $20 and they were sold out of tickets for the day. Beau was still on a book hunt so we entered the massive 6 floor mall that was connected to the towers. There was a huge Christmas display and Christmas music playing throughout the mall. Being in the mall with all it's pretty decorations put us into the Christmas spirit. Beau browsed through the book store and I took a little wander around the mall. Beau found a book to his liking and then we went for lunch. We did some more wandering of the mall but we couldn't afford to buy anything here, it's a little more expensive, and legitimate, than China Town. It was also packed with Christmas shoppers. After much wandering we headed back to the hotel. I stopped into a few bead shops but they were about the same price as home so there was no point in buying any. Once back we started reorganizing our bags. Mine was being checked while Beau was taking his as carry-on. We headed out for some dinner after we were organized. We asked at the desk for a good place for Malaysian food and found one of the buffet style places. The food was delicious and super cheap, you just had to ignore the little cockroaches. It was an outdoor eatery. Back at the hotel we prepared a couple of peanut butter and jam sandwich for the flight. We got into bed relatively early but had trouble falling asleep. Looks like not much sleep for us for the next few days.

Beau at the Petronas Towers

Christmas Decor

Last Days on Langkawi

We survived the night bus and found our hotel very easily. They let us check in at 5am and we were able to have a nap before setting off to explore Kuala Lumpur.  There's apparently been earthquakes in Christchurch but it can't be help.  Fortunately, I don't think our flight will be affected.  We just might have to brush up on our earthquake procedures :S

Dec 21 – Beach Ball

For a bit of a change this morning we went for breakfast at a different place. I had baked beans on toast, it was delicious, a nice change from eggs. After we went in search of a beach toy. We found a pretty cheap beach ball and headed to the beach. We went to our usual spot but the security guards caught on to us today so we were shafted to the beach. We lazed around, but it wasn't too hot out today as it was pretty cloudy which was good since we weren't in the shade. We went into the water and started playing with the beach ball. It was really fun until Beau stepped on a shell and cut his foot :( We headed back to the room so we could clean his foot out and then we went in the pool for a little bit. Afterwards we headed to find some lunch. We went to a different place that was serving Nasi Campur and tried a few different dishes. They had really good butter chicken and whatever else I ate. It was super cheap and super good. We looked into a bus ticket for the morning of the 23^rd and were told they were sold out. We couldn't believe it! They has said to just book a day in advance but here we were two days in advance and no tickets to be seen. We were able to procure a ticket for the night of the 22^nd. This wasn't ideal because we were going to be on a seated bus over night, not conducive to a good night's sleep. Gotta roll with it though. We had to talk to our guesthouse before booking the ticket because we had already paid for the 22^nd but the owner was very nice and gave us our money back. We picked up some beers and Popsicles as a consolation for the bus stress. We skyped Mom, Dad and Elaine in NZ for a bit. They seem as ready for Christmas as you can get without snow. We went out to the Duty Free shop again to check the price of liquor and some clothes. We were going to return to the place we had lunch but they didn't have their Nasi Campur out so we went further up to the place we ate on the first night. We had a yummy Indian meal. We were so full that we decided to forgo our usual dessert and settled for just coffee. It was a little sad to have to do that as it's our last night on Langkawi.

Dec 22

One thing I won't miss on Langkawi is the lumpy pillows at our guesthouse. I get such a kirk in the neck from them! We got ourselves all packed up, breakfasted and checked out by 12am. We grabbed a cab down to the Kuah ferry jetty where a ferry will take us to Kuala Perlis but not 7pm. We dropped our bags at the left luggage department and did some exploring of the ferry terminal and the grounds. There is a great big eagle statue next to the ferry terminal. Langkawi means something like eagle I think, hence the statue. Beau was being goofy, as usual, and I took some pictures of him. We discovered that the Langkawi Fair Mall, the largest mall on Langkawi (mockingly), was near by and spent the rest of the day wandering the mall. We thought we should pick up some clothes that are a little warmer than what we have so we both bought a pair of cheap jeans. We figure when we get tired of carrying them around we'll just ditch them. We also found a few stores selling diving masks. While we had lunch we did some research on the net and decided to buy masks for our Christmas present to ourselves. We are now the proud owners of scuba diving masks, now we need to go diving to test them out! We headed back to the ferry terminal and had a beer on a bench. We grabbed some dinner to go and loaded up onto the ferry. The seats on the ferry were a hodge podge of all different aeroplane seats. We arrived in Kuala Perlis about an hour later and walked the one block to the bus station. We had a short wait and boarded our bus. We were having trouble falling asleep, surprise, so we watched The Hangover 2. It was pretty funny. Would have been a little more perfect if we had actually spent sometime in Bangkok though. We attempted to sleep again and hopefully we'll suceed with a few Z's before arriving.

The Eagle Statue

Goofy demon Beau (the eagles wings are coming out of his head)