Signs

There were two signs I noticed as my taxi rolled away from the hotel. The first was a battered oblong of metal by a car park, proclaiming in big red letters that 'THIS LAND IS NOT FOR SALE'. Was that a political statement about how a country cannot be bought and sold? Was it a warning to gangs of roving Malaysian estate agents? Have there been so many people turning up with a car and finding the parking so convenient that they wanted a permanent space? I would have got out and asked, but I can't miss my flight back to Singapore.

Food in Malaysia

Last night we went to an English restaurant called Albion, where I had pumpkin gnocchi and a quinoa risotto, and wondered why I hadn't encountered these dishes while growing up. I suppose my childhood diet, while being far more exotic (ham sandwiches, pork chops, fish fingers, defrosted mini pizzas) faied to include such English staples.

The Birds

After a 6-hour coach ride (which felt more like a 4-hour coach ride punctuated by two hours of the coach sitting in various random car parks) I got to Kuala Lumpur, and walked from the Berjaya Times Square mall to our hotel. Along the way, I had taxi driver after taxi driver ask me if I wanted a ride.

As I got closer to the hotel, three women scuttled out of a doorway to ask if I wanted a ride. "Hey baby, do you remember me from Australia?" one of them lilted. I considered stopping and asking whether she'd served me a Thai green curry in the Gold Coast in 2008, or if she'd been queuing up for a delayed flight to Hong Kong with Qantas, but I had to assume she was just guessing I was Australian. After all, I was a solitary male, who needed a shave and a bath, and I was wearing shorts and pulling a suitcase. This was just the latest ignominous misidentification of my nationality (after the Singaporeans guessing I was French or Dutch) so I trundled along to my hotel, where the check in staff didn't believe my passport and had to wake up my wife before allowing me into the hotel room. That I had booked and paid for.

(I can't be too annoyed, because at the same time that this is going on, HSBC are continually texting me whenever my wife uses her bank card, as if she can't be trusted and her husband requires full financial oversight. It's strange living in the 1850s, it surely is.)

Anyway, today we got up and after I ate my own body weight in croissants, we took a taxi to the bird park. It's big: apparently one of the largest in Asia, and is chockful of peafowl, cattle egrets and blue crested pigeons. There are a lot of different aviaries, including some where the inmates will climb onto you. For a while I was amused as lories stood on a man's bald head, until a cockatoo alighted on my backpack and then tried to eat my camera.

The Dirty Way Out Of Singapore

I was going to fly to Kuala Lumpur today, but I couldn't get a flight, so this morning I booked myself on a bus, and this evening I went up to the Golden Mile Complex on Beach Road. And wondered if the person responsible for naming things in Singapore needs to be fired.

Back to Hong Kong with Great Expectations

Happily, the flight from Penang to Hong Kong left on time so I didn't spend much time in Penang airport. It's an odd airport - there is a McDonalds and a quite decent coffee shop before you go through security, but airside there's a small stall selling two kinds of potato crisp and one kind of bottled water. Does that imply that McDonalds is some sort of security threat? Or that people go to the airport for fine food, but only if they're not actually flying?

A corporate day out

Today was another day of fierce airconditioning in tropical Penang. In the morning it was chilly, in the afternoon I was struggling to keep my eyes open and not fall off my chair.

Driven in Penang

The plane was delayed flying from Singapore by an hour, so I didn't get into Penang airport until 1:20 in the morning, and then I had to get out some money, and pay that to the taxi kiosk, and then get into a slightly shabby white taxi, so I had no hope of getting to bed before two o'clock this morning.

Kinabalu National Park

When the driver gets frightened and says "oops", that is usually a bad sign. Unfortunately, when you're doing 90 km/h down the side of Mount Kinabalu, there's not much opportunity to modify your travel plans in favour of a more cautious chauffeur.

Things to do in Kota Kinabalu

Last night we were fairly shell-shocked after the return trip from the wetlands, so to relax I put on Shutter Island, not realising it would produce yelp after yelp of fear from my fiancee, and snort after snort of disgust from me at the sub-Angel Heart rubbish that was being spewed forth. Since it was 1 a.m. before the film concluded, we woke up this morning feeling a little groggy and stunned, and so ended up looking for something to do in Kota Kinabalu.

Apres le deluge

Yesterday we signed up for a trip to the Klias Wetlands to see some monkeys. I hadn't realised that this would require an interminable trip in a coach all the way there, surrounded by Chinese tourists who needed to be prodded into giving up any space on the coach for us to sit down. The scenery, to begin with quite interesting and a change from Hong Kong, gradually turned into just a whole lot of palm trees and rice paddies, until I passed out asleep from boredom, and awoke half an hour later to find we were still travelling through the endless greenness, only occasionally punctuated by a brown river.

Monkeys and fish and things

Today we got up later than yesterday, partly because we had no more damnfool ambitions to walk up a hill in the rain to look at the back of a shopping centre, and partly because I'd stayed up too late reading The Informant.  Another of the books brought over from Canada checked off my list.  After half an hour of unsuccessful meddling with my laptop's recalcitrant wi-fi connection at The Coffee Bean, Malaysia's Starbucks-a-like, we took a taxi out to the zoo at Lok Kawi.

Arriving in Kota Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu is one of those airports where they x-ray your luggage when you arrive, to catch you smuggling things in (or perhaps you've transported an enormous weapon of mass destruction along with your underpants).  However, they only x-ray large suitcases, not hand baggage, which makes me suspect they're only looking for objects of a certain size.  Have people been sneaking fairground midgets into Malaysia through Kota Kinabalu in the past?  I'm not sure why a fairground midget would be different to a small person in any other occupation, but then I'm not a smuggler.

Not relaxing in Malaysia

Malaysia is a relaxed country, but this is a problem if you decide to leave in a hurry.  We got a taxi from Sentral at 1:40, which was possibly cutting it fine given our flight was at 4 from KL LCC, but we probably would have been less stressed if our taxi hadn't seemed to travel as slowly as possible, all the way there.

Broken yet again

Kuala Lumpur is a strange city, particularly so when you arrive from Hong Kong, God's own experiment in how much concrete you can put in one place before the inhabitants go mental and start choppering each other to death. KL was hacked out of a jungle that keeps threatening to return, so swathes of the city are green forest, with the occasional random enormous building that appears to have teleported in from the 25th century. Perhaps because it's only been a city for a few decades, rather than a loose collection of villages, the transportation hasn't been quite worked out. If it rains, all the traffic stops (and there's a lot of traffic). When all the shops shut at ten, all the traffic stops for an hour too, as everyone tries to drive home at once.

A weekend in Malaysia

I'm rather sore now, after my first proper exercise in two months, since the day I broke my toe. Today I got up at the same time as any normal Friday, but instead of going to the office headed to the airport and checked in with AirAsia.