I met an Austrian woman eating street food and she's in Hong Kong working as a logistics and design person for the equestrian events for the Olympics. I'd noticed all of the jockey and horse billboards everywhere but just thought Hong Kong had some famous jockey competing. Turns out that all of the equestrian events will be held in Hong Kong. The Austrian said that more than 100 planes full of horses have been flown in and that many of them get jet-lag just like we do but all have arrived healthy. I had my palm and face read by a [View Full Entry]

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Back in KL I tracked down my friends I'd met in the Perhentian Islands who lived there. They were great hosts and took me to the good Indian restaurants they knew and to a free open bar. Thanks Kevin! After that we went to a party at a club downtown for the finale of the TV reality show "So you think you can dance-Malaysia". It was entertaining to see all of the contestants and their fans dancing it up and the winner CC with her groupies sporting t-shirts with her name on it. A girl in our group had been a [View Full Entry]

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My time in Malacca picked up a bit-was a bit dreary after having seen so many museums. Next day I walked around Chinatown and wandered into a temple with Taoist, Confucionist and Buddhist shrines. I started chatting with the man at the desk about religion and he quizzed me on my Buddhism and since I scored 80-90% correct I walked away with not one but two books on Buddhism! He said one of them is really hard to get outside of Asia. I wandered back to the hostel not knowing what a colorful crowd we'd have there that night: the owners [View Full Entry]

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I arrived to Malacca yesterday at 5am after leaving the Perhentians at noon the day before. I had breakfast at a Chinese market since they were the only ones awake and hung out til 730ish. I made my way to the hostel I hoped to get and a couple was leaving as I arrived. They said to go on in and knock on the door where the owners were sleeping. I knocked. No answer. Knocked again louder this time and a European woman in her 50s came blustering out and was clearly irritated to be awaken. She yelled at me that [View Full Entry]

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We took a speedboat out to Perhentian Kecil from the mainland-another bronco bucking ride! A girl I was travelling with and myself were the last 2 off the boat and the driver started yelling that we'd have to hurry and get off as he was easing close to a cement staircast out of the water up to the walkway. I had my backpacks on and managed to get my left leg up onto the staircase when he started drifting the boat away my right leg totally in the air! I wavered and nearly lost my balance and fell into the water [View Full Entry]

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My first night in Kota Bharu, which is supposed to be one of the cultural hubs of Malaysia, I consulted my Lonely Planet and discovered that it was one of the nights that has a free show at the cultural center. I dragged along a teacher from Kentucky of all places who was doing a stint in Japan with the JET program. We arrived to a traditional band of about 8 men playing behind the shadow puppet stage. Then I took a seat on the ground up front next to all of the local little kids with their dads and watched [View Full Entry]

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Half of the people in Cameron Highlands are of Chinese descent, around 30% Indian, and the rest Malay. The Cameron Highlands is an old British hill station and (according to an informative Indian shopkeeper in town where I bought a ton of tea) since the British already knew how to efficiently utilize the Indian caste system in India they decided to bring them here and plug them into the tea industry. Indians were given specific jobs according to their caste and paid based on the daily amount they produced so there was incentive for work. The British brought over Sri Lankans, [View Full Entry]

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Langkawi Island was rainy-the kind of weather I'd hoped to escape-but it IS monsoon season. We did have one decent day to enjoy the super-soft white sand beaches. That morning we did an island hopping tour and the highlight was zooming along on the speedboat and jumping over the waves like we were on bucking broncos. You couldn't stop from laughing it was so much fun. The first stop was at an island with a freshwater lake in the middle, that according to the map, took up much of the island but did not seem at all to scale looking around. [View Full Entry]

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We decided to use our hotel points to stay in a 5-star hotel in KL after the jungle. Our first night we went out to a club in the Hilton and when asked what we were doing in Kuala Lumpur they didn't believe my response of backpacking. The place was buzzing with excitement because Mel Gibson was in house for some environmental fundraiser and was supposed to show up at the bar. We saw him later in a special VIP bar tucked in the back with security all around him but at a distance so he could still chat with his [View Full Entry]

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I've had a fear/obsession/paranoia with leeches ever since I witnessed a traveller in Laos 2 years ago with blood streaming down his legs still an hour after having hiked in a leech area. Disgusting! I'd read that we'd be in leech territory in the jungles of Borneo so I made sure to bring tennis shoes, long socks and pants and even briefly considered buying leech-proof socks. And finally the time had arrived for our jungle trip... We took a bus from the national park to Sandakan and booked a jungle trip from our hostel near the Sepilok Orangutan Rehab Center-one of [View Full Entry]

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