Malaysia to Vietnam

Dear All,
Melacca is a great town! Lots of history, beautiful architecture, great museums, fun shopping, a crazy crash of cultures and really good food.
We visited several different museums in town but my favorite was the "Enduring Beauty" one. It's amazing what people the world over have done to make themselves beautiful in their eyes from corsets and tiny shoes to widened ears and lips, reshaping heads, elongating necks, filing teath, bleaching or dying, tattooing, cutting, burning and hanging weights off different parts of your body. It was a fascinating museum and made you think twice about everything you do to change your appearance.
Another enjoyable part of Melacca was the "Jonker Street Walk" where they close down half of Chinatown and have a big night market and party complete with kareoke contests and line dancing in the street. A lot of it was put on for tourists up from Singapore but you didn't care, you got the idea that these poeple knew how to have a good time.
From there we went on to Tioman island that was quite possibly our favoritest stop on this trip. There are several small towns on the island but they consist of a couple of mini marts and guesthouses and thats it really. We laid out on the beach, read our books, played cards, watched other people drink too much, made friends with the man who ran the "paint your own batik" shack and took a scuba diving course.
Scuba diving was amazing! We took a four day course and finished the five instructional videos in the first two days and were in the water on our first. Most classes have three or four "confined water dives" that happen in a pool or something, ours started out in shallow water right in the ocean and we were swimming with the fishes and over and around corral on our first trip under the sea. We had an absolutely fantastic time though we questioned our sanity when we were doing our studying and homework the first two nights when we were supposed to be laying around on the beach. It was worth it!
Erika and I were both struck at what a solitary experience it is, you have hand motions to communicate with each other now and then but they're more for "I'm running out of air" or "lets go up/down" than to say "holy crap did you see that fish" or "can you believe we're seeing this- it's unreal." As the two of us have been experiencing all of this trip together, and we're both rather vocal beings, it was hard to wait, even until we were above water, to turn to each other to gasp and chat.
We spent a week on the island and enjoyed every minute of it before we had to return to Kuala Lumpur where we spent one night before flying out to Hanoi in Vietnam.
Our first night it was raining to an unhealthy level and we ended up taking a guy up on his hotel tout when he offered to pay for our taxi and had free email and breakfast.
It was a nice enough place and our first full day was eye opening as we walked around the old quarter, shopping and seeing what there was to see. People can't drive here and your life is nearly taken every time you step out of your hotel but there is always something to see and what there is to see is mind boggeling.
Our second day our hotel helped us organize our tour to Halong Bay and we left early in the morning in a full mini bus. We got to the boat docking area where boats were fighting to get to the front and people were climbing all over all sorts of boats to get from far away boats to the front. We climbed onto the boat our guide pointed out and then had to back track to another boat when he apparently changed his mind or something- "a more beautiful boat"- we would soon learn that he was just often confused and unorganized.
We ate lunch on the boat as we pulled out and got to know the two German couples, a girl from N. Ireland, another from Wales, another from HoChiMihn City and smiled at another Vietnamese couple who didn't speak any English though the woman did speak some German.
Boating through HaLong Bay is like floating through a postcard and your mind just doesn't accept it at times. The way islands jet right out of the water and how the bottoms are being worn away by the sea is just incredible. We visited two caves that day that were halfway up one island and huge stalactite filled caverns that had been lighted up with orange and green and red lightbulbs that made it rather laughable.
Sleeping on a boat was great fun and I really enjoyed it but I probably would have enjoyed it more had we not had to get up at six thirty to go kyaking. Our guide had told us seven but he changed his mind about every time table he ever gave us and we were already starting to distrust him so we weren't too surprised when he knocked on our door so early. Of course our guide didn't get into a kyake (how do you spell that word? I just don't know) to show us around the area, he just put us in boats and sent us off, telling us a vauge idea of where we could go and telling us to be back in an hour. Keep in mind that dozens of other tourist boats are floating in and around these same rocks and don't really keep an eye out for passing kyaks.
It worked out and we really enjoyed being able to see things up close and explore on our own. Though I readily admit that my paddeling skills could use some work and the one time we wobbled and almost tipped was entirely my fault. Thankfully we didn't and made it back for breakfast.
Then we sailed on to Catba island where we lost one German couple and we got out for a two and a half hour treck across the island with a guide we were told to call "Number 8". Great fun but interesting to do with E in flipflops as her shoes had been stolen in Melaysia.
The German couple, Axle and Manuala, were amusing and fun, Dueng from Vietnam was interesting, Rhea from Wales and Salina from Ireland had both been teaching in Japan but had only just met in Hanoi and were great and eager to drink. Then there was the Vietnamese couple who were hard to figure out, sometimes they didn't even seem to like each other and other times they were real affectionate. The woman would sometimes chat with the Germans but I never saw the guy talk to anyone, not even try. And at odd times the woman would touch our hair, she man handled E trying to see if her blonde hair was died and continually told Salina that her lips were beautiful and had her picture taken with all of us Western women. It was a bit awkward having them around just cause you felt you were always leaving them out but they continued to do everything we did even when we had free time etc.
After our treck and lunch at our hotel we paid for an extra trip to Monkey Island. The very idea of a monkey island was a little hard to pass up and to be honest we were a bit disapointed after our experiences with monkeys in Thailand. There just weren't that many around.
I stayed on the beach we arrived at with the UK girls while E went on to the next beach with Deung and the German couple as our guide said it was just 300 meters away and was more beautiful and peaceful. Turns out it was 300 meters up, 300 meters across and then 300 meters down. ANd all of this after a two hour treck that morning and only flip flops to wear. Our guide was crazy. At four thirty he started trying to herd us to the boat (he had said five) and I just refused to go, I wasn't getting on a boat without my sister. As soon as they were in sight he tried again and again and again, until I actually walked on the boat with E. It had taken them a little longer to get back as she had stabbed her foot on the "razor sharp rocks" on the way back to beach. By that point nobody really liked our guide.
That night we all sat around listening to the odd selection of music in the hotel restaurant while we sipped at water and the rest had beers, then they bought some rice wine we all shared. We headed out for the one "disco" or club on the island and took a mini bus, it was sort of sad how empty it was and then people left as soon as our mad party came in. We jumped around a little bit and ended up in a kareoke bar that closed only a half hour after we left, we enjoyed ourselves more in spite of the island than because of it but then had the trouble of our mini bus taxi driver being drunk so decided to walk home. It worked out after a couple of wrong turns and more than a couple of motorbike taxi offers.
The next morning we had to wake up at a terribly early hour for breakfast and our boat back to land. It was great floating through the water, passed the islands with people who were now our friends though is was kind of sad to leave somewhere that was so beautiful even if it was tainted by bad leadership.
Of course getting off of our boat and onto land was harder than we had expected as we were required to get our bags from our boat over and through, onto and passed the three boats between us and the dock and what with ropes, josteling, bags, low roofs, etc. it's a wonder we all made it and no one or nothing plopped into the water though one person nearly broke a toe, I got scraped by a boat and another person was smacked in the face by a rope.
We were all delivered back to Hanoi in one piece and E and I have found a hotel (with a little difficulty as it's a holiday here now, we didn't know) and are planning our next week here in the city.
Hope all is well with you and I haven't put you to sleep with this long letter. My love to you all, Kristen Rose

Malaysia

Dear All,
We're currently in a city called Malaca in Malaysia.
We got into Kuala Lumpor on the fourth and spent several hot days touring around and seeing the sights. It is very warm here and I've never sweated this much in my entire life, I didn't know it was possible for my body to produce this much sweat. We went and spent an afternoon in the airconditioned planetarium, went up to the top of the Manara tower, visited two mosques, the Islamic Arts museum and the national history museum.
The architecture here is beautiful with lots of Chinese and Islamic influences and the culture is very diverse. They've been ruled by so many different people and are just now celebrating their fiftieth year as a nation, consiquently there are many people who speak english and lots of outside influence on society. There are far more covered muslim women than I expected and it's interesting to see how they intermix with native Malays, the Hindu's, the Chinese Buddhists etc.
After our time in KL we took a bus and a boat up to Teman Negara supposedly the oldest rain forest in the world (I don't know how they measure something like that but I'm guessing someone will let me know after this message). We spent three nights and two days in a hostel on the other side of the river fromt the national park and each morning we took a boat over for our day of hiking. They have a forest canopy walk that's about fifty meters tall (E says it's only twenty five to forty but it felt a lot higher than that!). It's a plank walkway that's held up by a net that comes up to about my shoulders, you're advised to stay five meters away from the person in front of you and I appreciate that as it moves and sways enough without someone being close to you. I don't know if I've mentioned my fear of hights before now but being that far above the ground lookind around at the middle of trees is scary! Middle of trees- we weren't even at the top.
The trees in this place were amazing! Tall and huge and some of them looked as though the bottom was fabric that had been folded up with odd curves to them. We also hiked out to a cave that we crawled through with a guide and group, I don't think we would have been brave enough to do it on our own as the place was full of bats! I'm not fond of bats, they carry all sorts of diseases and they flutter and hang and are just overall creepy. But we did do it and came out smelling like bat guano- that's a smell you want to avoid.
Yesterday we traveled back to KL and from there took a bus down to Melaca. A funny little old Chinese man met us coming off the bus and offered us his guesthouse which we took him up on, we're right in Chinatown which is the old part of the city right next to the old Dutch quarter, little India and the town square. He gave us a ride into town and a full blown tour as we went along, pointing out the sights, giving us a history lesson and telling us where the best eats and shortcuts through town are.
We'll be for the next three or four days before heading on to Tioman Island where we're going to learn to scuba dive!
I'll try and update you all again as soon as possible, until then I hope you are all well and that you'll all write me.
Kristen Rose