Sunday 13 & Monday 14 January 2013 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

An hour on the ferry back to Lumut, and a 4 hour bus ride back to KL completed my west coast triangle and concluded my first week of travelling. After a slow start, being jet lagged and alone in KL the first time around, I arrive back with a bit more of a spring in my step!

I’ve been told that Corbin, Jake and Mitch have a spare bed in their quad room that they aren’t paying for so I try to find their place. I found it, but the guy in reception told me they weren’t staying there. I trudge off again to try to find the place that Miriam and Emily are staying, the Matahari Lodge, and find it, and them, quite quickly.

My reunion with Miriam was beautiful. It wouldn’t be long until we were drunk together again like the good old days! (There you go, I said something nice about you!)

First job was to book our flights to Sandakan in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, which we found for £40 each with Malaysian Airlines on Tuesday at 8:15am – an early start that morning then! And then we set out to eat in Chinatown. We found quite a popular place, each ordered something different and struggled with varying degrees of success with the chopsticks.

We then made our way to the hostel that I thought the guys were staying in, and discovered Jake at the roof bar. We had a beer then and then went off to find some cheaper beers in Chinatown.

Drinking is a comparatively expensive pastime here. As it is a Muslim country and the locals don’t drink it, it is heavily taxed. You can get a huge meal for RM6 and then pay RM8 for a small beer. Very odd! It will be interesting to see what the prices are like in Langkawi, which is a duty free island.

We found some 330ml Chang beers for RM3.90, the cheapest beers I’ve seen so far by a long way, and bought a few each and brought them back to our hostel. We sat on our balcony on the 3rd floor and drank them. Corbin and Mitch soon arrived and Mitch and I headed back out for more beers.

We were soon all pretty drunk and decided it was time for us to exchange some British and North American culture. Mitch showed me how to ‘shotgun’ a can of beer, and I showed him how to ‘strawpedo’ a bottle. Culture over.

I woke up, disorientated, at 11:30 in a room without windows, ate lots of toast and set out for the Batu Caves on the bus.

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The Batu Caves are about 13km from KL and full of monkeys. It’s a Hindu shrine that includes the world’s largest statue of Lord Murugan and more steps than anyone else in the history of the world has climbed, or 272 to be precise. We were told that, on 27 January, the place will be flooded with about 500,000 Hindus who will go there to worship and were shown some pretty gruesome pictures of guys with hooks in their backs. Not too sure what that was about.

Now back at the hostel, mentally preparing ourselves for an early rise tomorrow to catch our flight and listening to a huge thunderstorm and torrential downpour outside, which is all quite exciting… Well, Emily’s excited anyway!

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