The Adventures of Bruce and Ian

And with that we were off! Our Malaysian mission: see as many of the country’s beaches and jungles, experience as much of its culture, and cram as much of its famed cuisine into our mouths as we could in the space of our trip. Record everything, and then report back to you, our Malaysia.com readers…

We’d been preparing for our whirlwind trip to and around Malaysia for months, but it got off to a relatively sedate start: a thirteen hour flight to Hong Kong. Ian was lucky enough to be able to snooze for most of the trip, but I’ve never been able to sleep while flying. I killed time with a Charles Stross paperback (thought-provoking, geeky fun), Woody Allen’s “Matchpoint” (excellent), Pacino/Deniro vehicle “Righteous Kill” (exceptionally awful) and plenty of Mario Kart on my Nintendo DS.

After a quick connection in Hong Kong, we touched down at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It was noon the day after the day it now was back in Vancouver (yeah, it confused us too), and we were completely beaten down by jet lag. But we were there! In Malaysia! Months of prep and anticipation had finally paid off, and nothing was gonna stop us from taking Kuala Lumpur by storm!

…Except the sudden realisation that Ian had left his laptop on the plane. After much panicking and a quick wait, the EeePC was returned to our grateful hands by a cheerful member of the Cathay Pacific staff, who told us that she had the exact same model. Go figure. With the laptop snugly tucked into Ian’s backpack, it was now time to take the KLIA Ekspres (this was the first of many Malay phonetic approximations of English words we spotted) to KL Sentral Station in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, and just across the street from our swank new digs and home base for the next couple of days: the KL Hilton.

We were in Malaysia, on the other side of the world!