We found a hostel room - literally a box with a bed in it and a few unexpected visitors - roaches! But no bed bugs and a place to catch a few hours sleep. After a quick nap we set out to explore the city. The weather was very hot and humid! Staying in Chinatown, we were a stones throw from the local market, hawker stalls and all manner of food stalls. We had a great breakfast of chinese soup, noodles and wontons. Then headed to the Petronas Towers - The tallest twin towers in the world. The fifth tallest building in the world. The towers are set in the centre of town with a huge mall built around it's base. We were too late to go to the skywalk, so we enjoyed the cool air conditioned mall and sampled the cheap Malaysian eats!
We spent a couple days exploring and went back to see the city from the skybridge. The Petronas towers are an incredible building feat, the skybridge weighs 200 tons and provides incredible views of the city below. Again we were sucked in by the mouth watering smells and tastes and spent most of our time in KL focused on food!
We headed for the east coast next to Cherating. The Malaysians are so friendly and English is widely spoken. Driving across the country we saw the palm oil plantations that have taken over the natural landscape. The roads and infrastructure have been very impressive and the buses were very comfortable. We got a bit of a run around at the bus station - the bus stations are really just streets where the buses turn up to gather passengers, but there is no ticket counter or information booth in a lot of the "stations". We had one cab driver trying to convince us that we had missed the last bus to Cherating and trying to sell us a costly taxi ride, but we stuck to our guns, moved down the line and then the locals were pointing out the bus to our destination.
This bus ride was the opposite of our ride into Malaysia and we arrived 2.5 hours later than expected. So we walked into this small seaside town in the dark, searching for a place to stay. Being that the East coast is rainy/monsoon season, the town was fairly quiet with some things shut down completely, but we managed to find a little hut to stay in for a couple days, the cockroaches that greeted us through the slated floors were quite large and left us sleeping with the lights on to keep them at bay.
Luckily enough, we had headed to Cherating to do some surfing and it just so happened that Billibong was having a surf competition later in the week. The rainy season meant that we would get showers, some downpours but we still ended up with loads of nice weather. The beach was a half moon shape with white sand beaches and turquoise waters. The first day we found a surf board and instructor and Greg hit the waves. With his natural atheletic ability he managed to stand and surf the first 3 waves in! The water and air were warm and 3 hours later Greg was officially a surfer. As the evening came on, more and more surfers came out to catch the waves, sadly they were not the monstrous waves that the world class surfers were hoping for, but great for learning and still incredible to watch the pro's rip it up.
The next day we got another board and Greg taught me what he had learned the day before. The Maldives surf team was playing in the waves and I got a loud cheer as a managed to stand for the first time. I even stood up many times and rode the wave all the way to ankle deep water. The Maldives team were doing incredible tricks on boogy boards - they reminded us of the Cool Runnings team but instead of bobsleds they had surf boards.
Fresh seafood was everywhere and we saw the restaurants and stalls serving everything from stingrays, to crabs, to tiger prawns, one sided fish - they only have one eye and swim sideways along the bottom of the ocean, one side looks like a fish and the other side is blank!
The tournament day dawned with dark clouds, lots of rain and piddling little waves. We watched the little kids ride the waves though and some were incredible, doing tricks and riding the waves for long stretches. All the people were super friendly and we met ex pats, locals and other travelers, enjoying this chilled out little town.
Heading to Johor Bharu to catch our flight to Borneo was an adventure. We set out for the bus station at 630am to catch the 645 bus which did not come, we waited and waited and finally met an ex pat who was waiting. He was there to see if the bus showed because it hadn't been coming lately and he wanted to go to town in a couple of days, he said try the 815 bus. Again no bus came, we saw one go by empty and tried to flag it down but no luck. Finally we decided to call Mr Lee, who we had met the first day and offered taxi service to the towns, but back in town we couldn't find Mr Lee and there are no other taxi's in town, so back to the main road to try to flag a bus or taxi. Our hostel said there was a 9am bus, but once again no bus came. Somewhere during this time we had even started thumbing for a ride and got lots of honks and waves, but finally around 930am a car pulled out of the town we were in and picked us up and even dropped us right at the bus station. He spoke a little English and his little son just stared at us. The kindness of strangers once again shone through and he didn't even want to accept money from us for the lift.
The airport was a little building with a couple of shops and for those of you from the east, they shockingly had a Mary Brown's Chicken!! Our bag weight limit was only 15kg and mine weighed in at 16.5 and Greg 18.9, so we wrapped a sweater and our rain jackets around our waists, put on our hiking boots, filled our day packs - really we just put our wet clothes and batteries in their and ended up just under the weight limit for the flight. Off to Borneo!
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