kez & hay travels 06

Now have we got a bit behind on updating the blog!?! Must mean we've been having too much fun!!!

KL is big and bustling, with great market streets and yummy curries.  The multi-racial population of Malays, Chinese and Indians gives this city a great vibrancy.  We visited the Petronas twin towers...eventually, after being turned down the first day as they had had their day's quota of 800 visitors by 09.30!!!  This was a popular place!  We also spent many hours looking around the biggest shopping centre ever - Bluewater eat your heart out!  We visited the Discovery centre where Kerry learnt lots of interesting facts about the planet's origins and Hayley beat the fastest record for a karate chop!

We journeyed on to Malacca, the birthplace of the Malaysian heritage, before it became part of a colonial empire, passing from Portuguese, to Dutch and finally to British hands.  Although the majority of the colonial architecture has wasted away, the town's centre still retains part of the Portuguese fortress wall, and the Church, (which changed names as often as Malacca changed colonial power), at the top of the hill is still intact.  The Portuguese culture is also still practised by a few descendant communities today.

It was then time to say farewell to Malaysia and hello to Singapore.

And we thought we had this travelling lark sorted by now!!!  Turns out travelling to Malaysia means you need to book, which meant our trip down to Malaysia took a day longer than we planned.  From taxi-van, to boat, to bus, to another bus, to taxi-van, to yet another bus, to taxi, to boat, we arrived at our long-awaited destination - the Perhentian Islands.  These 2 islands on the eastern coast of peninsular Malaysia are textbook tropical paradises - so say no more!

We did a couple of fun dives and we saw beautiful sea life, including the huge scary Trigger fish (Our dive instructor happily conferred to us just before our dive that he had been knocked unconscious by one of these scoudrels!)  Again life was very hard with a lot of sun-bathing and swimming.  Do you all hate us?!!!  We also made friends with a couple of baby orphan turtles being looked after by our guesthouse until they were old enough to fend for themselves in the big wide world. 

We finally had to say a sad farewell to our new paradise and move on to Kuala Lumpur - again a one day delay awaited us!.