Further Wanderings

I was really torn as to whether to begin this blog with our departure from Wellington or our departure from New Zealand. But for two reasons, I decided to go with the latter: First, I’m rather lazy. Second, I’m very entertained by the fact that we’re picking up right where we left off over three years ago, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. (Though before continuing, I must thank both of Sarah’s parents for being their usual wonderful selves when we visited them in Christchurch, and Sarah’s friend Vicky for organizing a very fun trip to the Christchurch Cup Day horse races.)

The Masjid Jamek Mosque (still redundant, as Masjid still means mosque in Malay) by day. Check out the blog entry immediately previous to this one for a nighttime view

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After the Cameron Highlands, Kuala Lumpur was a bit of a shock.  Hot, sticky, big and busy, KL was everything that Tanah Rata wasn’t.  But somehow, despite the change of scenery, we were still felt a bit lackadaisical during our time there.

Part of this came from the fact that Malaysia was such an easy place to travel in.  Public transport was good, everyone was used to tourists (especially in the areas we were visiting), and virtually everyone spoke at least a bit of English.  After the rigours of places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sumatra, it almost felt TOO easy to be exciting.

Another source of the feeling came from the nearness of our trip’s end.  During our stay in KL, the day 2 weeks prior to our return to NZ came and went.  Since booking our tickets we’d been focussing more and more on the END of the journey, and finding it correspondingly tougher to focus on the present.

The Masjid Jamek Mosque (a bit redundant, as Majid means mosque in Malay), Kuala Lumpur

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It's always so nice arriving in a city and already knowing your way around. Since we'd spent a day on the island of Penang in transit between Thailand and Indonesia, we had no troubles finding our way to a nice hotel, ... [Continue reading this entry]

Wow. Didn't think I'd be doing this again so soon. In this instance the countries involved are Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and we didn't even use air travel! We had some minor problems purchasing our train tickets for the Bangkok-Malaysia journey ... [Continue reading this entry]

My first impressions of Malaysia came from the border town of Johor Baru, just across the causeway from Singapore. To my surprise, it didn’t appear all that different from Singapore. True, the buildings looked just slightly more run down ... [Continue reading this entry]