Malaysia!

So Malaysia didn't start out to well for me actually. By the time we landed in Penang I was pretty much crippled with food poisoning. I held it in until we made it to the hotel room, but that whole night was miserable to say the least. I was actually worried I wouldn't feel up to being on the road the next day, but I ended up rallying in time to meet the ship, Meg, and her two friends Kayoko and Jenna when they came into the Port of Penang. These girls are so fun! I love how much Brennan and Meg are clones of each other, too.



As soon as we picked up the girls, we hit the road and headed to Cameron Highlands via Ipoh. Brennan drove and I was his trusty co-pilot. We did hit a major rainstorm which made it a little scary to drive up the windy mountains. Once the rain cleared, we stopped at a little strawberry farm on the side of the road which was so cute! I think we put them in the poor house from all the samples we ate. Brennan asked the lady how business was and she kind of grunted, so... maybe not so good? We liked it anyway.




When we made it all the way up the mountains to the town of Tanah Rata in Cameron Highlands, we hotel shopped a bit and ended up finding the CUTEST little villas called Bala's Chalets. Our "family villa" had a downstairs and upstairs and was called Tiffany's Corner. It was SO great... except for the spiders. YUCK.




We spent the whole next day touring around Cameron Highlands. The highlights were definitely hiking around the highest peak of Malaysia and touring the Boh Tea Plantation. I honestly think I have never seen anything like these places. They were absolutely amazing... green and lush. The kind of place where there is mist stretching across the treetops. The tea plantations were SO neat. The way tea grows looks so trippy! It's somewhere you have to see, I think, to really see how neat and crazy the place is. I'm so SO glad we saw it. Renting the car was one of the best decisions we made the whole trip :)






Thank you, Jenna... not sure we could have found where to go without your direction.



So from Cameron Highlands we made it down to Kuala Lumpur! The most recognizable thing there is the Petronas Towers (which were stunning!). We ate and slept VERY well in KL to say the least. What was kind of perplexing about KL (and about Malaysia as a whole really) was just how kind of "any city in the world" it felt. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE cities and it was so fun to be in a new one, but there isn't anything very distinctive about what people looked like or what people were eating... their music... it was a huge mix of ethnic Indians and Chinese splattered with a bunch of Westerners. We spent a lot of time perusing markets, enjoying our awesome hotel room, and hanging out with the girls' Semester at Sea friends. It's good to know some things never change about Semester at Sea. It was like I could see exactly who from their ship equated to people from our ship. Funny.




NO KISSING IN THE CABS!



From KL we flew back up to Penang for our last night of the trip. We found this Night Market/Food Paradise that was basically a huge courtyard of tables with food stalls all around them. We met a new friend from England named Ash and just sat around the table sampling the different plates and Tigers. Brennan tried to take a picture of "the ambiance" and ended up with a picture of these two women who lived in Penang... are you kidding me!!??



Fortunately they were good sports and ended up thinking it was as funny as we did. Ash, where are you looking?



The group at the end of the night...


6:30am the next morning we left Penang and flew to Bangkok, to Beijing, and to DC totaling another 30 hours door to door. Totally worth it for what was a great trip. Good to get away... good to remember what it's like to be lost and different and anonymous and international. Good to read books and spend too long getting out of bed and trying street food I can't pronounce and trying to smile as much as the Thais do. Good to be gone, really. And good to be back now... I suppose :)