Biggest, tallest, longest, widest

We have been in Malaysia for about 10 days now and have decided that it is a fantastically friendly country that seems to have a slightly unhealthy obsession with things being the biggest, tallest, longest, widest, whatever in the world! To get you started on the theme, at the airport you are encouraged to marvel at the amazing site of the worlds widest unsupported steel aircraft hanger, wow, what a sight! We have also seen the worlds largest walk-in, fully covered bird park (there seem to be a lot of caveats to there record claims!) and the worlds tallest twin structured building, the Petronas towers, but that was actually pretty impressive!

We have only been here ten days but we have already met more locals and spent more time chatting with them than in all our time in Thailand. There is a really interesting mix of cultures with Malays, Indians and Chinese people making up the majority. We have had good long chats with people from each ethnic group and it has been really interesting to hear there opinions on Malaysia as a country and each other. We both now know more about Malaysian history, religion and politics than we ever did about our home countries!

In the Cameron Highlands we went for a walk in the jungle and up to a tea plantation, it was a lovely slightly demanding walk, with a few landslides and fallen trees making it that bit harder. We saw a baby snake on the way up the hills to the highlands too, it seems to be becoming a habit! After a quick tour of the tea plantation and a few lovely cups of tea we thought we would try and hitch down the hill the 5 kms to the town to get the bus home. We were picked up immediately by Kalid and May an Army Major and his wife who took a liking to us and rather than dropping us at the town to get the bus, took us all the way to the hotel, then offered to take us on a tour of the area, so we did! It was great, we were taken to all the major sites and he explained loads of stuff to us and made us try durian, "the king of fruits" apparently, it's not it's gross it tastes like rotten cabbage and onions mixed with drains! The best bit is that it makes you burp like a drain for hours afterwards, what a treat! But they were a really lovely couple and we ended up spending the whole afternoon with them, and have an invite to visit them in Kular Lumpur next time we are there!

Another great bloke we met was an Indian guy whose name means arrow or knowledge, but i can't remember how to spell it. He owns a shop on the high street in the town we stayed in in the highlands and every evening we would go to his shop and talk to him whilst we ate our ice creams. One day we took a bus up to a town with another tea plantation as as we started the 3KM walk up the hill he pulled up behind us in his car, it turned out he had a farm near the tea plantation so offered us a lift, ace! He decided once we got there that he wouldn't both going to his farm yet and so he gave us a guided tour of the tea factory ( he is a guide there in peak season) we learnt loads. He decided it would be more fun to spend the afternoon with us so we had tea overlooking the plantation, visited his farm, went to a Buddhist temple and various other sites in the area. All through the afternoon he taught us about local and national politics, race relations within Malaysia, religion, particularly Hindu and Buddhist, the Malaysian education system and all about his family. When we left he gave Jenni a goodbye present, he was really sweet! There have been loads of other lovely people too, too many to mention!

We've got to go as someone wants to get on the computer, but we'll write again from Kota Bharu where we're going tommorow.

Lots of love
Dan and Jenni

Thieving bastards!

We are now in Malaysia, in the capital Kuala Lumpur. All was going swimmingly until last night when someone in the hostel nicked Jenni's Finnish mobile phone. We are trying to make people feel guilty so they might give it back, as it had photos from our honeymoon and lovely texts from everyone from the last 6 years. She is really upset and we have now lost everyone's phone numbers from that phone. If be some quirk of fate the person that stole it is reading this blog, please give it back!

Dan & Jenni

Rainforests - not just a clever name

After leaving our lovely little beach front bungalow in Samui (where we did out previous post) we have had some quite exciting experiences (to do with animals, once again), and also some extremes of comfort on the housing front. We took a ferry to the mainland to get to the Khao Sok national park and it all went very well, and as we had not booked any tickets beforehand we were feeling quite pleased with ourselves. It wasn't until we had got off the ferry and were trying to walk into the town centre to catch the bus, that we realised that our ferry hadn't taken us to where we thought, but to this little place in the middle of nowhere, where there was a further hour's drive to Surit Thani (the place we thought we were in already!). By this time we had missed all the buses, so we had to wait for the next ferry to arrive, and got on a minibus to the city. So it all ended up fine in the end, but we hadn't been quite as lucky with the travel as we'd hoped...

All this travel was to take us to Khao Sok national park, which is one of or the oldest rainforest in the world, something crazy like 130 million years old! We picked out a nice sounding place from the guide book and headed there, to find that they had slashed all there prices by half as it was low season. So we could stay in the top of the range bungalow for not much money at all (4.50 Pounds or 7 Euros), great... ish... It turned out, I suppose unsurprisingly, that there was quite a lot of wildlife in the area who thought our room was lovely, so we all shared it! Us, the frog, the giant beetles, the geckos, the bats, and the snake! We made a lovely little family! The snake managed to confine himself to just staring at us in the bathroom this time, but the bats thought it was great fun to fly aroud the bedroom!



This didn't make us immediately feel at home, but the scenery was beautiful and we thought a little walk in the jungle would but us at ease, as I was still getting over my snake-in-the-lap -trauma. Walking up the road to the park entrance Jenni suddenly stopped next to me and yelped, I looked down, screamed, and bravely ran away from the aggressively reared up 1.5m long bright green snake crossing the road! Jenni calmly walked away a little bit and took this photo so you could all see it. The snake then calmed down and slithered across the road and up a tree. So we have got a good collection of snake incounters now, Jenni almost walked into one, I had one in the lap and one staring at us in the shower, a snake lovers' paradise! We did make it onto the walk and were treated to a view of a small group of monkeys feeding up in the trees right near us, much more our cup of tea!

The next day we did an organised trek and visited a floating raft house deep in the jungle. We got to spend about an hour watching some more monkeys feeding in the trees which was great, and also a leech, which was gross! Our guide thought it would be good to leave it on the guy who had it on his arm so that we could all see how big they get and how to get rid of them! The scenery was again stunning, amazing rock formations around this lake that we travelled across for an hour on a longtail boat to get to the start of the trek. During the walk we discovered why they are called rain forests, it rains! Proper hardcore "I'm standing under a shower" heavy rain. The track we had walked up became a stream and we were then walking in at least 10cm of water the whole way back to the boat. It was great fun and we got soaked, but the camera didn't seem to agree, but it seems to have recovered now!

We then moved on to the Andaman coast which is the west coast and is in rainy season a the moment, which is proving correct! Were in Khao Lak which was hit really hard by the 2004 Tsunami destroying most of the beach front properties and killing many people. Lots of the places have been rebuilt now, but the beach still has many remnants of the pre-tsunami era and shrines to those who died that day. It is quite upsetting walking on the beach here and seeing the half buried steps and bridges to nowhere and the huge empty plots of rubble and debris.

We are staying in a super luxury hotel at the moment which is amazing, by far and away the nicest place I have ever stayed in. They have all slashed the prices massively to try and lure people in and it worked with us, it is not much more than the cheapy places we normally stay in but it has air con, TV, Swimming Pool, little shampoo and bath cream bottles, a bath, soaps, towels, toilet roll, orchids, it is lovely. It is a bit wierd as you feel like you could be anywhere in the world, it doesn't feel like being in thailand really, so it is like we have had a short holiday from our trip, strange but quite nice too!

Right that will do for now. We are now probably going to go to Malaysia, we are trying to work out how to go there as there is a bit of a slight bombing problem in the South of Thailand at the moment. We need to make sure we avoid as many bombs as we can as they don't sound very nice!

Make sure you check out our new photos, there's lots from New Zealand, and quite a few from Thailand as well. Click on the photos on the right!

Lots of Love
Dan and Jenni

Snakes and sweetcorn

Hi it’s Jen! We're now on Koh Samui, which is the largest island on the Gulf Coast of Thailand. It's just paradise in this little village we're staying in, it's a proper town where real Thai people live, and they've got really good restaurants serving real Thai food to Thai people - and us! They don't really have choice, they tend to have one or two dishes they sell, and you either have it or you go somewhere else, but it's really delicious, and it's super cheap. The village's called Mae Nam, and it's on the north coast with lovely 4km long beach with lots of coconut palms, and brilliant beach for swimming, in case you plan to come to Koh Samui at some point.

A couple of days ago we were exploring the island on our little hire scooter (it's turquoise, which goes very prettily with Dan's helmet, which is purple) and stopped to have lunch at this little restaurant perched on top of a cliff overlooking some white beaches, turquoise water, well you get the point, and anyway, so there we were sitting quite happily, Dan was sitting just under where the roof of this little shelter ended. We were eating some noodles, and the next thing I know is that Dan's screaming, has spat out his food, and flicked up this snake that had landed on his lap! The 75cm long green beast had obviously been on the roof trying to catch some birds or maybe just warming up in the sun, had lost its balance, and landed on poor Dan's lap! He was obviously just horrified and real scared, and after he'd stood up so the snake rolled onto the floor, it slithered off the side of the restaurant, and down the cliff. I just saw the snake's body rise over the table when Dan was struggling to get up. Isn't that horrible!!!

After the incident with the snake, Dan was very jumpy and twitchy the whole rest of the day, it wasn't till the next day that he seemed normal again, but we still didn't mention anything to do with snakes in case it made him go all weird again.

Another thing we wanted to tell you about is water buffaloes. As I said earlier, we're staying in a real village where people go about their real business, and there's this man near where we live who keeps water buffaloes, and he takes them one by one to have little walks on the beach at sunset, and he takes them into the sea to have nice little baths too. How brave he must be to be walking these enormous animals amongst people and make them be nice and not kill us if they've had a bad day. (Sorry the photo's not in focus.)

They also do bull fighting with the water buffaloes, but contrary to what they do in Spain, they actually make two buffaloes fight each other. Although I still am not sure I'd like to go and see this, it seems a lot more fair than a man with a spear stabbing an animal.

Oh and I've found my new favourite yoghurt - sweetcorn and kidney bean! They sell it here as a normal yoghurt, and it's sweet, and although I must admit that having vegetables and beans in your yoghurt is a bit odd, I quite liked it. Dan couldn't stand the smell so he would not try it although I especially picked a lovely selection of both corn and kidney beans for him.

I was also wanting to say that the rest of Koh Samui island seems to be full of tourists, and feels like you're in Mallorca, or Benidorm, or some other place we imagine not to represent a specific country, but just a resort full of red skinned sweaty tourists (we of course are something entirely different ;) ).

Hope to hear from you all again soon!
Jenni & Dan