Truly Asia!

As we said a sad goodbye to Cambodia, it was time to move onto Malaysia. A short flight from Phnom Penh to KL, a bus ride up the west coast and we soon found ourselves in vibrant Georgetown - a bustling melting pot of a city in the heart of Penang Island. And what an introduction to Malaysia: a microcosm of the finest elements that make up this wonderful country: crumbling colonial buildings, lip-smackingly tasty food (the best south Indian banana-leaf curries outside of India, a myriad of inventive Cantonese dishes easily as good as those in HK or mainland China, and adrenaline-pumping spicy Malay cuisine - deep rendang curry, nasi lemak and kangkong belechan) and highly visible, distinctive religions practiced day-by-day, side-by-side (on one corner of downtown Georgetown stands a huge mosque whose golden tops shimmer in the searing afternoon sun, an impressive white-washed Catholic church, an elaborate Chinese buddhist temple and an amazingly intricate Hindu temple whose outside walls and rooftops are adorned with statues depicting a whole host of deities and fables). 'What a wonderfully tolerant society!' we thought.

This utopic thought was soon shattered in a brief encounter with a fierce looking Chinese lady in her mid-fifties. As we climbed up the hill in workaday Ayer Itam district to reach the Kek Lok Si temple, the Chinese lady struck up conversation:

'You're very adventurous!' she exclaimed.
'Why's that?' we replied.
'You don't get many tourist this far out of town.' she confirmed.
'OK' we responded non-plussed.
'How long you been in Penang?' she enquired.
'Two days.' we said.

Silence. She leant in.

'Too many muslims!' she barked.

Where the heck did that come from?! Out of nowhere! Nothing we had done or said vaguely suggested that we wanted such a discussion. Yet, she felt we could be trusted with, or perhaps that we needed to be informed of, this vital piece of survival info.

'They are all violent!' she continued. 'they will snatch your bag and run you over!. They not even care if you die!'.

Just as we were about to counter-argue this blatant display of religious intolerance, the weirdest thing happened...

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a spindly, dark, muslim man with crazed eyes and a raggedy demeanour walked right up behind us and started growling.

'Roar.' he whispered. 'Roar' he growled. 'Roar!' he shouted. 'I am a werewolf! I am a werewolf!' he motioned with his hands a pair of ferocious claws shredding his prey. 'I am a werewolf!' he shouted and ran off into the dense forest. I will never forget his eyes - steely, intense, maniacal - pure lunatic.

Well, that kind of destroyed any counter-argument we were about to fire back at the biggoted Chinese lady. Strangely enough, she was totally oblivious to all of this and I guess that sort of summed up her blinkered view of the world - completely unaware and bound by her own beliefs. Well, at least we can say we met a werewolf!

After several days in Penang, we embarked on a long bus journey to the Cameron Highlands - a cool hill-top station retreat created by British colonials eager to escape the tropical Malaysian climate. And what a retreat! - within one hour of arriving we were sat down sipping the best tea we had tasted since leaving London last year and gorging on dreamily soft scones filed with oozing cream and fresh strawberry jam. Heaven. During the next few days we explored the surrounding dramatic countryside landscape - endless lush-green rolling hills covered in immaculately preened tea plants tendered by expert Indian farmers shipped over on five year contracts. We toured the Boh Estate Tea Plantation, ventured into the magical mossy forest (it was straight out of Midsummer Night's Dream - we half expected to feel the shadows of Bottom, Puck and Titania floating past us) and embarked on some tough but rewarding countryside hikes. All this was rounded off by the wonderful guesthouse we stayed in. It felt like home.

Tired of long bus journeys, we treated ourselves to a minivan ride to Kuala Tahan - a small fishing village that nestles alongside the protected Malaysian jungle - Tamen Negara. The journey was made a lot more fun by a lovely English couple we met - they had a refeshingly open attitude to traveling and a great sense of humour. We chatted, debated and laughed all the way. Once we settled into our hut for the night, we were ready to tackle the next few days ahead. We explored as much of the jungle as we could on our own. We set off armed with Malaysian rice dishes wrapped in banana leaves, purchased from the foodstalls that lined the river and a very vague trail map. We walked for hours and hours without a single sole on sight. We came across monkeys, wild board, monitor lizards and loads of creepy crawlies: fat ones, thin ones, long ones, ugly ones, beautiful ones, tiny ones, huge ones, hairy ones - it was like nothing we had seen or heard before - like being in a wildlife documentary. Shame our camera couldn't capture the magic - it finally get crushed in my pocket as I crawled through a narrow cave full of bullfrogs, snakes and hundreds of bats flying straight past my head.

We left the jungle by motorized sampan and traveled two hours upstream to the town of Jeruntut where we caught a connecting bus to KL. As we arrived in this huge and hectic city, we got that same feeling we had in Hong Kong and Bangkok. Something so reassuringly familiar about the bustle, the noise, the volume of people, the sounds and sights of everyday life that made it feel instantly like home. We stayed a week.

After taking in the old Portuguese port of Melaka and the rather uninspiring Singapore, it was soon our last day in mainland Malaysia after a wonderfully varied four weeks. It was time to fly to Borneo. Our mission: to find the elusive probiscus and wild orang-utan. It's all about the monkeys.