We ate our way through Malaysia truly Asia...

And truly Asia this place really is. A conglomerate of Chinese, Indian, and Malay people. Food of all kinds. Food stalls, most importantly, serving fantastic dishes for $1. Foot reflexology on every corner. And incredibly kind individuals who love their country and welcome their tourists. Malaysia gave us a "Taiwan-fix" providing for us all the things we miss about Taiwan. And then it gave us much more too...lovely beaches, green, lush countryside, clean streets, a fantastic transportation system (boats, trains, taxis and planes...all easy to navigate with low costs), and a bit of the 1st world that I now desire every now and then. We actually ate Krispy Kreme and Wendy's. I know, I know, but hey, when you live in India, a place that will forever refuse to allow any of the Western world enter, you start to miss that Western world.

We went there for break this year and we visited Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi Island and Penang Island.

Highlights:

1. The view from our hotel in KL. Note KFC.

2. The very cool Aquarium in KL where we witnessed a piranna feeding. Jon held a shark. The shark was not too happy. He splashed water all over us. Here is Jon trying to hold the shark for a second time.


3. The food. We ate most of our meals in "hawker style", which looks like the picture at the top of this blog. We discovered a variety of malay dishes that we now love: wang ton mee, a fried oyster dish, roti bread. We found delicious thai stalls where we had our fill of thai style fish - ginger and garlic galore! And always some sort of Asian brew...Tiger, Anchor, etc. A staple travel drink.

4. We made our way up to KL's version of Seattle's Space Needle. At the time it was built it was the third highest needle structure in the world. It has obviously been surpassed many times since then. We got a 360 degree view of the city as we tried to keep up with the awkwardly recorded audio guide. It was cool, all in all. But the really cool part was still to come.

The what we thought expensive ride to the top of the needle came with a couple of other viewing opportunities. You see, the Malaysian govt figured out that the needle itself is a fairly low end tourist destination, so they built a few other travel friendly sites on the grounds. There is a horseback riding center, a zip line, a Formula One 'experience', and best of all, a mini petting zoo.

Normally petting zoos are for kids. In fact, we almost just shined it off thinking it would be fairly lame. Oh how wrong we were. In about 200 square feet lived literally 100's of birds, reptiles and serpants. Best of all, though we didn't know it at the time,we just so happened to be there at 6:00pm...feeding time!

Anyway, before the feed, I was enamored and had to hold the largest lizard I had ever seen. That was nice. But right next to me, I was wondering what the worker was doing holding an upside down chicken over a 15 foot reticulated python. Yup, feeding time...

The first python wasn't hungry, but the two guys that lived next door sure were. It is always fascinating, to me at least, the speed and precision of python snatches. Watching these two strike, pull, and constrict a chicken that was wider than them was impressive and reminded me, somehow, of my wedding day. All in all, the trip to the needle was above and beyond what we had hoped for. A beautiful view of KL turned into a lesson in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom and an opportunity to view a 16-18 foot python gulp down a chicken like I would a cough drop. Highly recommended...especially at 6pm. Or check out our videos of this feeding in picasa!

5. We took a train to Langkawi island. Lovely place. not much to do, but we found a nice place to stay with a great beach, bath temperature ocean water (love that!), and a fantastic food stall located just outside of the hotel so that we didn't have to eat the expensive and no where near as good hotel food.

The next best activity on the island after laying out, reading, swimming and eating is the Langkawi cable car, which takes you to the highest point on the island. This was actually a really fun day with some great views of the island.We also read that the Seven Wells (7 tiered pools created by a waterfall) were a great spot to swim and play on the island. Um, this is what we found....

No thanks.


6. After a few days on the beach, we took the slow boat to china...well, to Penang. A very Chinese-ish island known for its food. Our day and a half here was pretty much planned out based on particular food stalls. We basically wandered around the main city, Georgetown, and sampling one tasty dish after the next.

We did find time to hike around the Penang National Park. Our hike led us to Monkey Beach, which ended up being one of our favorite adventures of the week. We had a nice beach pretty much to ourselves until the monkeys showed up trying to banish one of their members into the ocean forever. It was crazy...we watched the monkey's attempt to attack each other until finally the one being banished just walked right out into the ocean. I thought he was committing suicide until I saw a little head bobbing up and down and heading for a rock out in the middle of the water. Sure enough, he climbed up onto the rock and just stayed out there minding his own business until some tourist swam up to him, scared him off the rock and basically chased him into the water. At this point, a boat picked him up (ie. the boat pulled up next to him, and he just jumped on) and dropped him off on the shore. He took off into the jungle. I hope he found a good hiding spot.

Meanwhile, we turned our attention back to our stuff that we had left on the beach, and low and behold a couple of monkeys were digging around in our bags looking for our lunch.

7. We spent our last night and day back in KL. We visited the largest walk-through aviary in Asia. Um, bird parks are just plain cool. I mean, just look at these pictures! Every time I turned around some crazy bird was standing, flying, sitting, walking right next to me.

7. Our last night in KL was one of our favorite nights. We had mango ice (I LOVE mango ice), Hoegaardens, more delicious thai food from our favorite food stall, foot massages from a quirky, fun chinese dude AND we both had our ears candled. Now, in the words of my husband, that was trippy.

Well, Malaysia, you truly are Asia. We loved it. We'd like to go back...and maybe even live there one day. I guess we'll all just have to stay tuned for that....

Thanks for reading. More pictures and videos in Picasa.