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
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
posted by Kristen Johnson | 9:06 PM
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